From scraps of fabric not worth saving, women used to make what they called yoyos – fabric bouquets for ornament. Kathryn Glowen makes them from men’s ties as an all-over field – abstraction from personal craft.
Detail:
Reducing men’s ties to knots (even floral knots), is (however sweetly) an emasculation of the male. Glowen’s insistence on the feminine, however, is less a critique of the male than a celebration of a certain kind of woman who is anonymous inside a female sphere: the career-waitress at a cheap diner, the divorcee who picks up her morning paper wearing pom-poms on her slippers, the hat check girl at the roller rink. Be they ever so humble, they dress up.
Instead of being tough and funny, as in Rachel Lachowicz – Untitled (Lipstick urinals) (in 3 parts) Lipstick, wax & hyrocal 15 x 9 x 6 in. 1992
Edition ed. 5 (via)…
or Sherrie Levine, Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp),
brass, 12 3/4 x 14 1/2 x 24 3/4″, 1991…
Glowen has more in common with Nancy Drew – Flag Painting (Illuminati)
(45 x 30) glitter on canvas, 2009, after Jasper Johns.
Surrounded by fake flowers and wearing glitter eyeliner, girly-girls don’t care what you think. Feminists didn’t embrace the type until transvestites had, which means that in these bodies of work, Drew and Glowen derive not from female sources, but male ones.
Hi, Regina — I am catching up on your arts writing; glad to see it. Here’s an address you might want to add to your Seattle (and regional) artist websites:
http://www.barbarasternberger.com/
hope all is well — come to see us in the North Cascades sometime!
Kris Ekstrand Molesworth