Amanda Cachia Pandora’s Box Dunlop Art Gallery Laylah Ali Ghada Amer Shary Boyle Amy Cutler Chitra Ganesh Annie Pootoogook Wangechi Mutu Pandora’s Box Leesa Streifler Kara Walker Curated by Amanda Cachia Su-en Wong library and archives canada cataloguing in publication Contents Cachia, Amanda, 1978- Pandora’s Box. Essays by Amanda Cachia and Joan Borsa. Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina, Sask., May 16-July 20, 2008. Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-1-894882-28-6 1. Women artists--Canada-- Exhibitions. 2. Women artists-- United States--Exhibitions. 3. Women in art--Exhibitions. 4. Art, Canadian-- Dunlop Art Gallery Saskatchewan--Regina--21st century Foreword Pandora’s Box --Exhibitions. 5. Art, American-- Regina Public Library 4 2311-12th Avenue May 16 – July 20, 2008 Saskatchewan--Regina--21st century Dr. Elizabeth McLuhan p.o. Box 2311 Central Gallery --Exhibitions. I. Borsa, Joan M. II. Regina, Saskatchewan Curated by Amanda Cachia Dunlop Art Gallery III. Title. Canada, S4P 3Z5 6 Introduction N6496.3.C3R44 2008 This publication originates from an tel (306) 777-6040 Joan Borsa exhibition organized by the Dunlop Art 704’.0420971074712445 fax (306) 949-7264 Gallery, a department of the Regina C2008-901152-X Public Library. Financial support [email protected] Bearing Gifts: The Myth of Pandora www.dunlopartgallery.org 12 from the Regina Public Library, the Amanda Cachia Saskatchewan Arts Board, and The Canada Council for the Arts is cover Shary Boyle, Migrations, 2006. gratefully acknowledged. Projected cut-out, coloured gels. Artist Biographies From Shadow Songs collaboration 52 with Christine Fellows. Photography: Shary Boyle 54 Contributors design Zab Design & Typography 56 List of Works printing Welter Studio, Toronto 58 Acknowledgements water in one hand/the tricky minded presented in solo exhibitions have the beginning. I would also like to Foreword female, and fire in the other’…. sexuality touched on related issues (Leesa acknowledge Joyce Clark, Curatorial by Dr. Elizabeth McLuhan in women [is] a fearsome thing… Streifler and Rebecca Belmore for Assistant for her work on this project. united by a vital liquidity with the instance). Overall, however, there has elemental world, woman is able to been a dearth of feminist content in Dr. Elizabeth McLuhan is the tap the inexhaustible reservoirs of galleries in Regina in recent years. An Director of the Dunlop Art Gallery nature’s procreative power.”1 exhibition of thirteen Saskatchewan Pandora’s Box documents women, Remembering and Telling, and celebrates the contribution of curated by the noted art historian women artists living and working in Lynne Bell from the University of Canada and the United States to Saskatchewan was presented at contemporary art making, and is a the Mackenzie Art Gallery in 1991. proclamation of the diversity of their Although a watershed exhibition for 1 Anne Carson, “Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity,” in Pandora’s Box is an ambitious project These artists all reference their accomplishments today. Women its time, there was no follow up in Men in the Off Hours, (Canada: Vintage, 2001), 225. 4 developed by the Dunlop Art Gallery’s diverse languages, ritual, myths, have too often been the object or subsequent exhibitions to the themes 2 Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The 5 Curator, Amanda Cachia, who has cultural production, domestic and “vehicle of attributed meaning.”2 In and issues it raised. Seventeen Allegory of the Female Form, (Picador, 1987), 225. selected current work from among social customs, story-telling and light of this struggle over gendered years later, Pandora’s Box seizes the two generations of internationally values (such as African-American, implications, the current blossoming torch and highlights the contribution influential women artists: Laylah Ali, Egyptian, Inuit, Indian, Euro-North- of art produced by women about of women’s art in North America Ghada Amer, Shary Boyle, Amy Cutler, American, and Singaporean). women is exciting. The progress and through its selection of artists with Chitra Ganesh, Wangechi Mutu, Many of the works in Pandora’s evolution of the current generation perspectives that resonate globally. Annie Pootoogook, Leesa Streifler, Box reveal an inescapable sense of acknowledges the legacy of feminist I would like to thank the Kara Walker and Su-en Wong. immediacy and a fierce sexuality. art practice in North America and participating artists and to commend Artists in Pandora’s Box draw on Anne Carson’s observations on beyond: a legacy which has informed the curatorial vision and tenacity diverse cultural traditions to both classical notions of female wildness new fields of feminist art practice. of purpose of Amanda Cachia, the re-invent and re-invest traditional are pertinent here in the archaic This is the first examination of Curator. The Dunlop expresses myths and fairytales with new poetry of Archilochas “[who] contemporary women’s art and its gratitude to Joan Borsa for her meanings in dynamic and often summarizes the female threat in two feminist issues at the Dunlop Art introduction to this catalogue, and disturbing images/configurations. iambic verses: ‘She came carrying Gallery, although a number of artists her support for the project from We all return to memories and dreams like this, again and formative (Western) feminist art projects such as unlike the ideological and stylistic cohesiveness of other Introduction again; the story we tell of our own life is reshaped around Chicago’s Dinner Party, Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum influential art movements of the postwar period (Abstract by Joan Borsa them. But the point doesn’t lie there, back in the past, back Document, the Guerrilla Girls’ public actions and since Expressionism, Minimalism or Fluxus) Feminist Art’s in the lost time when they happened; the only point lies in Griselda Pollock and Rozika Parker’s book Old Mistresses: impact is rooted in “an ideology of shifting criteria,” which interpretation. Women, Art and Ideology insisted on claiming a space has not only “sustained an unprecedented degree of in a hierarchical and male-dominated art world – but internal critique” but “contained wildly divergent political — carolyn steedman, Landscapes 3 for a Good Woman, 1986 struggles for the right to be recognized as agents and ideologies and practices.” Similarly in a recent article art subjects of history have often been met with resistance critic Lucy Lippard discusses the difficulty of pin-pointing and growing pains. One of the significant lessons of the characteristics and achievements of such a diversified this period of almost 40 years of feminist theorizing, and constantly evolving movement as feminist art, a project, art making and activism is that there is a great deal which she suggests “like Conceptual art was not based on Pandora’s Box is a timely exploration of the passions, of structural difference among us. How to represent style but on content.”4 innovations and diversity that characterize feminist art our differences as well as our shared experiences In my conversations with Amanda Cachia, curator of today. It projects forward, it scans the past, the present as gendered and socially constructed subjects has Pandora’s Box, and as I asked her about her relationship 6 and our differences, and it points to new layers of creative remained a central preoccupation (and a strength) of to feminism and the impetus behind this project it became 7 and critical acumen. Since the 1970s women artists, contemporary feminist practice and scholarship. apparent that many of the artists selected for this curators, critics and art historians have actively engaged Indeed, in the recent flourishing of notable feminist exhibition (and perhaps the curator herself) do not readily with and contributed to debates on representation, art exhibitions, substantial exhibition catalogues and identify their practice as feminist. In some of the reviews authorship, desire, power relations and identity politics. comprehensive feminist art anthologies (particularly in and articles surrounding the recent resurgence of interest A great deal of this work has focused on strategies of the United States, but also in parts of Britain and Europe)2 in feminist art production a similar reluctance is portrayed. representing the body and the heterogeneity of women’s a recurring theme is the concept of difference – differences How are we to interpret this skepticism within the context cultural and social experience – an exploration that has among women, particularly across generational, national of what appears to be feminist art’s grand entrance on moved from producing “images” of the body to creating and cultural divides; but, just as relevant, differences in a coveted art world stage? Is this a re-examination of a more diversified representations of embodied subjectivity. the social conditions under which women produce art, in movement, confirmation of a new wave, or the interna- Other components of this work have emphasized the need the approaches, mediums and materials which are utilized, lization of “post-feminist” press? Guerrilla Girl Kollwitz to analyze, deconstruct and intervene in the histories of art, and in the political, cultural and critical perspectives which addressed the latter possibility commenting on why the and have affected change in the institutions, public spaces, inform feminist work. For example, in curator Cornelia term ‘feminist’ might cause adverse reactions: “The media and political processes that make up public culture.1 Much Butler’s introductory essay for the 2007 exhibition WACK ! love to talk about how nobody wants to be identified with has been accomplished since second-wave feminism and Art and the Feminist Revolution, Butler proposes that being a feminist.” “We have been working all these years to rehabilitate the word, because women and men They will be visited by critics who will yawn and stare at project other possibilities as they re-order, re-imagine, consumption, but more importantly they are marked by a who believe in the tenets of feminism don’t want to be the floor if they talk about feminism or identity.