Allan Appel Photo
Moskowitz at a”pop-up” exhibit at the old Robby Len.
Grace Moskowitz wants you to sit down to this battered old desk, take one of her coloring books, and choose crayons from the top drawer. When you begin to color, she’ll be in the moment with you, and you with her. That will be art.
Achieving that interpersonal instant of what she calls “mindfulness” is her art form. It makes first time Moskowitz she has shown in a gallery beyond the confines of an academic setting.
Frame from Lasley’s “Queens,” 2013, single-channel HD video.
Her “Autobiographical Coloring Book” is one of 15 works, in media ranging from video to collage, by eight artists both fledgling and established practitioners.
They comprise “Fem//me,” a “pop-up” exhibition that runs through through Sunday in an airy rented suite #215 at the old Robby Len building at State and Blatchley.
Artists Plotke Moskowitz, and curator Nimrod, with Asuncion’s “3 Sisters” mixed media.
“There are a lot of fantastic arts organizations in New Haven, but not a lot of independent projects,” said Selby Nimrod, the curator of the exhibition.
She said she aims to spark more of that through “Fem/me,” a project that got started when she and Hannah Plotke, one of the exhibiting artists, met and began to discuss their perceived need in town for more spontaneous exhibition, especially by younger artists.
Selby, who has experience working in town with Site Projects’ public art commissions, said their talk coincided with both the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and also the recent declaration by trail-blazing performance artist Marina Abramovic that she is not a feminist.
So “Fem/me” was born. The show is not so much an answer to Abramovic, who seems to think that in art “feminist” is a limiting or to be avoided pigeon-holing category. Nor is Selby’s pop-up a propping up of Friedan.
Nimrod with Marsh’s “Rollback Glasses,” 2011, mixed media.
It’s more of an opportunity for a young curator — next year Selby hopes to attend graduate school in art history — to show what she loves and cares about, and in the process to try to bring a posse of younger guns into the scene.
Selby says she didn’t ask the artists she invited if they are feminists. She wanted the show — hence the name — to indeed be about feminist issues, and yet not be constrained by them.
“Every piece is a voice contributing” to the conversation, Selby said as she toured a reporter around the high ceiling-ed airy suite, with a view of the highway and East Rock.
For example Laura Marsh’s “Cat Eye Glance” is “making a statement on the male gaze, or advertising,” Selby said. She pointed out that all of Marsh’s work in the show has some element of the eye, or glasses, or deals with, as Selby put it, “the politics of looking.”
There’s a lot to look and indeed gaze at in the exhibition, including Sarah Lasley’s “Queens,” a 15-minute single channel HD video, on whose huge monitor play arresting images of a young teen putting on and taking off make-up.
Video artist Lani Asuncion does not have video in the show. But in her “3 Sisters: Lost Myth (3 Sister Hoods)” she shows artifacts or props used in her videos. These grey wool blankets seemed to have casts of some prehistoric animal’s teeth cozily folded up inside them, as if comfort and dread were somehow in balance or alignment.
As to presentation, some of the smaller works hung on the walls get lost in the wonderful two-story space of suite 215. The center of the room seems to need some kind of giant sculpture to fill it up. I kept thinking, with the treeline of East Rock visible out the window, maybe Mother Earth was there in absentia.
In fact there is a lot about looking and being looked at, masking and unmasking, in this exhibition. That’s perhaps a natural subject for artists in general and in particular younger women artists.
Photo provided by gallery
Marsh’s “Cat Eye Glance,” 2013, belt loops and collaged imagery.
Which is why Moskowtiz’s “Autobiographical Coloring Book” is particularly refreshing.
By its inviting diffidence it seems to be making its statement about a subject even more universal and basic than seeing and being seen: Just being alive and conscious and the possibility and manner in which two consciousnesses can meet.
Or in the context of her “Autobiographical Coloring Book,” if visitors color in a coloring book of her making, they “add their life to it and we enrich each others’ lives.”
This is the way Moskowitz puts it: “This [her art] is no more or less art than anything else. I’m a mindfulness practitioner in my life. That’s my mode of creativity, if I can bring mindfulness to every action. I’m available to collaborate with the present moment. So I’m [even] hesitant to say ‘I’m an artist.’”
You’ll have to come, and color, and decide for yourself.
“Fem/me” runs through Sunday, July 28, from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Allan Appel always does a thoughtful job with these pieces.
But when I got to the picture of the giant sunglasses, I thought, "Hey, that's not Laura Marsh!"
As a point of mindfulness, I think it is always better to feature the artist with their work, rather than the curator.