Show #52:
Milkmade
Curated by: Mikela Wesson
Featuring: Jaclyn Brown, Anne Buckwalter, Hilary Doyle, Dominique Fung, Sarah Fox, Lynnea Holland-Weiss
Opening Reception: Thursday, August 9th, 2018 6-8pm
Dates: August 9th - September 1st, 2018
Field Projects is pleased to present Milkmade, an exhibition featuring the work of six figurative women artists. Jaclyn Brown, Anne Buckwalter, Hilary Doyle, Sarah Fox, Dominique Fung, and Lynnea Holland-Weiss navigate humanity, identity, womanhood, relationships, gender-related expectations, and aging through their unique, and often humorously contorted works.
Women are frequently reduced to fragmented attributes by patriarchal society, transformed into an imposed grocery list of gendered expectations. Milkmade is a grounding point on the spectrum of socially gendered perceptions of dominant cultural standards known as “normal.” By conflating women's bodies and biohazards, Anne Buckwalter explores an insecurity perpetuated in patriarchal society that frames powerful women as hazardous and threatening. Aged women are often misrepresented or not represented at all. Hilary Doyle’s sculpture model honors the strength and narrative of older everyday women. These endearing figures remind us of an inevitability that is commonly feared in dominant culture and churns emotions of dread, admiration, guilt, respect, and love.
As society becomes more reliant on image-based communication and judgments become progressively dispassionate and trivial through the often mindless use of social media platforms and applications we, as social creatures, are slowly becoming detached and alienated from society and from ourselves as whole individuals. These platforms lead to a magnification of the “grocery list,” subsequently resulting in fomo, imposter syndrome, narcissistic tendencies, dysmorphic experiences of self-hood, or even the outright rejection of individuals based on a fleeting image. Jaclyn Brown’s paintings rupture the normalized practice of sexting-for-validation and dually aggressive gendered exploitation via cute consumer culture; seen for example in her painting Tender where imagery of adorable kittens become wrapping paper to the genital package.
Milkmade compiles works that attempt to re-piece these fragments of observation and push back against the current status quo, utilizing humor to mollify viewers and allow them entry into their own intimate, experiential worlds while exposing their subversion of dominant cultural standards. The audience is reminded that there is much more to a single, individual human than the reductionist aspersions of a polarized first glance. These works simultaneously laugh at the absurdity and marinate in the celebration of being a woman.
