SANTA FE, NM.- Gerald Peters Contemporary is presenting its first exhibition of the 2025 summer season, Material Girl: Pop Culture and the Female Gaze. Bringing together six female artists working across media, the exhibition highlights the connections between the artists’ personal histories and social, political, and cultural realities of today.
Anchored in Pop Art, the exhibition explores how these artists use the genre’s vocabulary of familiar imagery, bold colors, and ready-made objects to examine socio-political concerns. Probing gender, sexuality, materialism, and commodification, these works offer profound personal introspection and keen societal awareness.
Dorielle Caimi (b.1985) is an American oil painter living and working in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Caimi completed a BFA in Painting from Cornish College of the Arts in 2010. Her works have been exhibited internationally, and reviewed in publications as American Art Collector, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine, Hi-Fructose Magazine, Juxtapoz Magazine, Southwest Contemporary Magazine (cover), and The Huffington Post.
Using figuration, vivid colors, and symbolism, my paintings use humor and abrupt juxtapositions of female bodies and objects to reexamine societal ideas regarding women and illuminate today’s world through the female gaze, psychology, and experience. In my work, women are as fulfilled, deep and complex as their male counterparts and play important and powerful roles in all facets of society.
Nicole Cudzilo (b. 1991) is a New Mexico-based artist and educator whose work explores the intimate connection between nature and the human experience. Known for her evocative environmental self-portraits, she uses her own form as a subject and symbol, becoming both part of the natural world, and a contrast to its grandeur. By embracing the moments in-between movement and stillness, action and reflection, each photograph becomes a visual meditation, accenting the delicate tension of what it means to be human—both fragile and powerful, deeply connected to the natural world, yet inherently individual.
Drawing on Pop Art’s visual boldness and mid-century pop cultural archetypes, my work uses staged self-portraiture to explore femininity as performance and examine how female identity is shaped by desire, consumption and nature itself.
Angela Ellsworth (b. 1964) is a multidisciplinary artist based in the southwestern United States, working primarily in painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance. Her solo and collaborative works engage diverse subjects including physical fitness, endurance, illness, social ritual, and religious tradition—examining how ritual, myth, and tradition move across cultures and generations.
Spanning historical research and contemporary themes, Ellsworth draws on personal history to highlight both mystical and physical forms of knowing. Her work navigates bodily and metaphysical realms, referencing rituals passed down through generations alongside her Utah upbringing to expand notions of the invisible and unknown.
As a feminist, Ellsworth reimagines groups of women from her polygamist ancestry as a lens through which to explore her own contemporary homosocial experiences. She is particularly interested in the convergence of art and everyday life, where public and private experiences collide in unexpected and transformative ways.
Esther Elia (b. 1994) is an Assyrian-Irish artist from Turlock, California. Her interdisciplinary practice engages family folklore as the basis for understanding mixed ethnicity and the question of how to be Assyrian in diaspora.
Elia’s practice spans small to colossal-sized sculptures. With inspirations from Assyrian folk stories to contemporary bodybuilders, Elia is interested in the intersection of tradition, history, gender, and shared personal experience. Her sculptures created from stacked tiles create totemic forms that re-represent Assyrian women in diaspora as goddesses, warriors, and bodybuilders. The scale and subject matter portray literally and figuratively strength and power of women.
Hattie Lee Mendoza (b. 1990) is a multi-disciplinary artist who grew up in Fowler, Kansas, and now lives in Peoria, Illinois. She has an MFA from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, and a BA in graphic design from Tabor College, Hillsboro, KS.
Influenced by her Great Grandmother and namesake’s Cherokee heritage and stories, Mendoza revives and continues that legacy within her family after generational loss of cultural connection.
A member of the Cherokee Nation, my process is a personal expression of the Native American Diaspora. I utilize found or gifted fibers and objects while incorporating Cherokee basketry, pottery, or beadwork patterns. I myself am a collage of cultures and react by collaging materials from my ancestors, contemporary community, and personal life experiences.
Jennifer Juniper Stratford is a director and video artist from Hollywood, California. Inspired by a love of video art, outsider cinema, and experimental animation, her work feels like something you might catch on late night cable or on an obscure video cassette.
Her work has been exhibited, broadcast, and screened internationally and includes MoCA, Palais De Tokyo Paris, Whitney Museum, The Hammer Museum, LACMA, The Getty, Cinemarfa, Museum of the Moving Image New York, New Beverly Cinema, BAM Cinématek, and on public access channels across the United States. In 2018 she was awarded a grant from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.
