Organized by Lydia McCarthy

This exhibition brings together ten artists (Ayanna Dozier, Sophia Frydman, Nicholas Grafia, Stephanie Hanes, Coco Klockner, Tatiana Kronberg, Lydia McCarthy, Sonja Nilsson, Miriam Radwan and Jordan Strafer) who excavate conscious and unconscious aspects of the ‘feminine’ through an embrace of the abject. In drawing, sculpture, photography and video, they push against and transgress borders of materiality, gender and sexuality.  

The cultural formation of femininity is structurally linked with the process of pathologizing, demonizing, sexualizing, and relegating any expression of it to the realm of the monstrous. From ancient Greek mythology to Charcot’s images of hysterical women in the mid-19th century, from 1970s horrotica to the present day Real Housewives, it is performed, exaggerated and turned into a spectacle that is to be both feared and consumed. Gender is central in these depictions, as any body that threatens the stability of masculinity’s monolithic logic is rendered non-human. This threat may come in the form of perversion, body modification, death, bodily excretions or any act deemed as ‘immoral’. Feminized bodies are cast as the monster–the witch, the evil temptress, the bleeding wound, the castrator–with their gender as justification for their subjugation. This image is in sharp contrast to the depiction of the sane, rational detachment of cisgender male-ness at the center of a misogynist, patriarchal system.

Each of these artists resist normative conceptions of gender and embrace the collapse of meaning possible through the monstrous-feminine, ultimately reclaiming their agency, re-defining their ‘otherness’ and disturbing order.