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Images,
left to right: Philadelphia Wireman, Untitled (wire, paper, plastic), c.
1970–75, wire, found objects, 4 inches high; Vaginal Davis, Untitled, 2012,
glycerine, Britney Spears eye shadow, Wet N Wild nail polish, water color
pencils, Afro Sheen Hair Conditioner, Extra Hold Aqua Net hair spray on
Cornflakes box, 10 1/4 x 7 1/4 inches.
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May 3 –
June 1, 2013
811 East
Burnside #213
Portland,
OR
Vaginal Davis and Philadelphia Wireman engage in a personal and idiosyncratic alchemy
using cheap and discarded materials–including eye shadow, hairspray and nail
polish, tape, batteries, and wire–that are mixed, smeared or bound together.
Obsessive, intuitive and prolific, both Davis’ and Wireman’s works are powerful
forms of portraiture, which conjure mysterious figures, both real and invented,
otherworldly and historical.
Vaginal
Davis is a performance artist, painter, independent curator, writer, film
maker, musician, and self-proclaimed “doyenne of intersexed art.” After leaving her hometown of Los Angeles for
Berlin in 2006, Davis began to cover the walls of her new studio/apartment with
hundreds of paper clippings, almost exclusively the heads and bodies of men cut
from newspapers, magazines and her own snapshots. As this collage began to eclipse the white
walls completely, Davis started to create small paintings of women, which she
intersperses among the otherwise overwhelmingly and overbearingly male
photomontage. These intimate paintings of women exists as equal parts
self-portrait and homage.
Using her
own personal beauty products as pigments for her paintings, Davis places the
small scale works amidst her living collage of appropriated images of men, in a
sense replicating her own real life experience as an independent, self-made
woman navigating the complexities of a male dominated culture. However, when
Davis presents the paintings outside of the context of her apartment, each
gains individuality by being given a title that references a specific woman
from history. Much of Davis’s work, as well as the formation of her own
identity, continues to be concerned with assembling and referencing a lineage
of unknown histories of independent, outlaw, and visionary female figures
ranging from Hollywood stars, to artists, cultural icons, writers and fictional
characters. Each painting becomes a
portrait and a tribute, granting its subject a space of prominence, power and
visibility.
In the
late 1970s a cache of over one thousand distinctive wire sculptures was found
discarded on the street in Philadelphia. The collection of objects came to be
attributed to a single person, who remains unknown. The Philadelphia Wireman
sculptures consist of different gauges of wire wrapped around everyday objects
and materials including food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, batteries, pens,
foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewelry. While these
assemblages resonate with historical and contemporary art practices alike, it
is also possible that these mysterious bundles are an American iteration of
traditional African power objects.
Vaginal
Davis and Philadelphia Wireman share creative practices that might be more
readily considered in relation to divination or magic, where the act of
creation is always linked to belief, and understood and employed as a
profoundly powerful force. Both Wireman’s sculptures and Davis’ paintings are
entirely specific to the contexts in which they were created, but their
resonance in the gallery setting lies in their displacement and their new role
as ambassadors of purpose from the worlds of their makers.
