NEW YORK, NY.- The Yancey Richardson Gallery presents Desire, a group exhibition of women artists offering a selection of works examining desire vis-à-vis the mesmeric female gaze. Taking form in a variety of media, the selected works tease out themes ranging from sex and death, to awkwardness, seduction, psychology, and semantics. Considering the capricious and fleeting nature of desire, the selection of works reflect a multiplicity of perspectives, giving preference to allusion and suggestion while refusing to settle into a programmatic visual syntax to derive meaning.
Together, the selection includes a peephole op-art ink drawing by Vivienne Griffin; a teen-crush style hot-pink toned photogram of Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune by Mariah Robertson; a symbiotic nature/soul film gesture by Ana Mendieta; a palpitating pillow talk video by Constance Dejong; a prickly, suggestive installation by Gabrielle Beveridge, a painting by Yoko Ono titled, Touch Me; visceral, physiological watercolors by Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin; and meditative, sensual, collages by Carol Bove and Ruby Sky Stiler. Additionally, there are photographs by emerging artists Dru Donovan and Whitney Hubbs riffing on overt/covert metaphors of desire, as well as Cindy Shermanʼs satiric projections, Moyra Daveyʼs vampy sister Lou, the clandestine, nude figure of Janice Guy, Hellen Van Meeneʼs statuesque damsels, Sharon Coreʼs candy apple compulsions, Erica Baumʼs truncated literary fantasies, and Marilyn Minterʼs black cherry smirk. Ruth Bernalʼs evocative image of a preternaturally festooned Bob Dylan for his 1976 album Desire, serves as a popcultural touchstone and curatorial inspiration for the show.
The works on view occupy an interstitial space between images of instant gratification designed to evoke desire, and images as critiques of such determinations. Instead, the selected works extend and open up a time and space for the generous movement of desire. In lieu of works that simply objectify desire, the selection of works hint at a generative space of desire before reaching the virile ʻclimaxʼ of objectification, thereby making visible a feminine desire that lingers in a space before.
Jodie Vicenta Jacobson is an artist, curator and educator living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She is Curator-at-Large for Blind Spot Magazine / Photo-Based Art and was Curator at The Horticultural Society of New York from 2003-2009. She is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery and teaches photography and contemporary art at the School of Visual Arts and Parsons the New School for Design. The gallery extends a special thank you to Dana Faconti, Editor and Publisher of Blind Spot Magazine, and Erin Yerby, for their ideas and support for this exhibition.
Erica Baum, Gabriele Beveridge, Louise Bourgeois & Tracey Emin, Carol Bove, Sharon Core, Moyra Davey, Constance Dejong, Dru Donovan, Vivienne Griffin, Janice Guy, Whitney Hubbs, Marilyn Minter, Ana Mendieta, Yoko Ono, Mariah Robertson, Cindy Sherman, Ruby Sky Stiler, Hellen van Meene, and others
