A FEW SMALL NIPS

Marisa Adesman, Genesis Belanger, Langdon Graves, Koak, Jesse Mockrin, Rose Nestler, GaHee Park, Jennifer Rose Sciarrino and Robin F. Williams

July 14 - August 12, 2022

 

Press Release

Mrs. is pleased to present A Few Small Nips, an exhibition centered on performing femininity and the absurd, highlighting how our culture places the burden on women to inhabit a disguise–almost a mask–to perform our reality, whether through cosmetics, technology, or even an external layer of civility, rendering the woman beneath refracted, distorted, somehow hidden.  

Titled in reference to the provocative painting A Few Small Nips by Frida Kahlo, this exhibition strives to converse with the female Surrealists of the 1940s and 1950s who used their medium to recontextualize their often precarious positions in the world, their work frequently secondary to male counterparts and contemporaries.  Kahlo performed this surreality in not just her exquisite painted works, which were often a means for recontextualizing gender identity, trauma, and inherent joy, but also in her daily life – choosing her dress, from menswear to traditional Mexican folk garments, as a way to exert control and confidence, and cope with the loss of bodily autonomy wrought by her gender, illness, disability, and chronic pain. Kahlo's work drew on inspiration from both indigenous heritage and the life-giving forces of female energy, allowing her to tap into a more vital, primal power that existed both within herself and what she saw as the broader world. By choosing to move between traditionally male and female presented identities, she could, at least temporarily, escape the often excruciating yolk of the rigid, Colonial society she had been raised within. Kahlo was also one of the first modern female painters to truly articulate the duality of self, the real and surreal that exists within all of us. Now, as society begins to catch up to Kahlo's dazzling vision of a world without gender borders and toward inclusivity, is the need for performative femininity no longer necessary? Or, is performative femininity another way our society drives the necessity to achieve external vehicles of self-expression?

Exploring life as a woman is inherently surreal: from early childhood, we are pressured to continuously conform, mentally and physically, both subtly through makeup, dress, and feminine code signaling, and more dramatically through childbearing or even plastic surgery. But is transformation a woman's prerogative–a way of escaping into a self-created reality–or does it come from the need to craft an alternate self to fit into the contours of modern society? What does it mean to reject or embrace this created self, consciously? 

In the midst of this years-long pandemic, ever shrinking attention spans, and life as we know it changing by the moment,  our world itself has become surreal. Out of necessity, many have turned to imagination and “magic” for both comfort and inspiration. The dreamlike, or some say nightmare-esque, quality of our current moment has also made the concepts envisioned by the original Surrealists perhaps the most adequate way to address the present reality. As a result of quarantine and the large amounts of time many of us spend homebound, there has emerged a new reinterpreting of every day; the formerly commonplace now imbibed with the mystical, talismanic. The outlandish now seems to live everywhere from the evening news to the kitchen table. Driving this wave is a desire to transform and enter an alternate reality, one which social media and technology cannot begin to replace.  

This timely exhibition highlights the ways women specifically are both rising to this moment and the methods through history by which they have transformed themselves–physically, psychologically, and spiritually–for both personal benefit and society's rigorous and relentless demands. This shapeshifting manifests in artistic work, often empowering the "unreal" to become real, and vice versa.

-Text by Laura Feinstein

For additional information, please contact hello@mrsgallery.com.