A Skin You Love to Touch (Keep Her Where She Belongs)

I N R E V I E W

A SKIN YOU LOVE TO TOUCH

(KEEP HER WHERE SHE BELONGS)

DUET GALLERY

Duet Gallery is a gem somewhat obscured by Grand Center’s flashier venues. No sparkling marquee guided me to its humble entrance, but as I descended the concrete steps I was greeted by glitter and vivid florescence. is a collaboration between local artist Katryn Dierksen and Brooklyn’s Moody Rose Christopher.

Katryn Dierksen, Don’t Look at Me (especially not through a lens) detail (photo credit: Katryn Dierksen)

Each artist interrogates the construction of feminine domesticity from a point of subversion. The show’s title is pulled from vintage women’s magazines, and appropriately so. The work channels the legacy of home-making as it is passed down from generation to generation, from post-war Levittown optimism to the age of digital convenience.

The transmission and inheritance of domestic knowledge is an iterative process, each generation altering, interpreting, and adapting established practice to suit circumstances. Dierksen explores feminine iconography through an analogous process of repetition and reproduction. Dierksen’s paintings, digital and otherwise, are images that are at once familiar and distant.

These icons of female stardom—including Lady Gaga and Debbie Harry—are represented in vividly-colored wall-bound posters, bright oil paintings with a cloisonné feel, a flickering TV screen, and repetitively patterned fabric. The posters recall the personal, yet unrealized, relationship a teenager might have with a pop star, while the fabric design especially solidifies the reiteration of iconography, a process by which an image becomes ubiquitous, household, domesticated. Dierksen has made icons into something we can wear or spread over our tables. A digitized iconography emerges. Dierksen has rendered it reproducible and quotidian, addressing the confines of female power and challenging the separation of private and public spaces.

The private enclave of the home as feminine territory is by no means a new concept in art. Moody Rose Christopher’s trio of woman-as-house paintings reference Louise Bourgeois’ Femme Maison in subject and playful style. While Bourgeois’ woman is on her feet, waving, Christopher’s women are contorted. At first glance, the sunny colors are inviting, the compositions whimsical. Here and there appears a slice of watermelon, a happy-faced chair, a Keith Haring style dog. On closer inspection, more disconcerting scenes are revealed. Empty domestic spaces are vacuoles inside rubbery, receptive bodies; staircases lead to handleless doors; splayed boneless limbs are braided together; the bodies of reclined eyeless women are just a series of vacant rooms. They have smiling mouths, though, and identifiable hands, fingers and toes.

Christopher’s reclamation of female space is born of the subversive perspective of her experience. The artist upsets the confines of the binary gender system just as her collaborations with Dierksen probe the constraints of the domestic space allotted to the female-identified.

The artists’ collaborative pieces echo the impotent extremities of Christopher’s house-women. Christopher’s Mom’s Ethereal Arms drape impractically across a table (over a table cloth designed by Dierksen), reaching for a mug (graced by yet another iteration of Dierksen’s icons) too solid and too small to grasp. The outsized stuffed arms represent our most useful appendage and yet sprawl listlessly in recreated, slightly awry domestic scenes.

Women Used to Know How to Sew is the pair’s richest collaboration in the show. A flimsy loveseat made from Dierksen’s fabric, too small and unstable for any imaginable body, cradles one of Christopher’s capacious, cushiony hands. The loveseat looks as if it would swallow you up if you dared to sit on it - like you would be folded into its rusty springs and vanish, emerging into an alternate nightmarish world, envisaged by a home-maker in the digital age, where images duplicate endlessly, dissipating into meaninglessness, and your hands, so essential for domestic tasks, are useless, clumsy, and bloated.

-Allana Ross

ALLTHEARTSTL.COM WINTER 2018/19 IN REVIEW

I N R E V I E W

Katryn Dierksen, Siouxsie’s Bathtub World, (photo credit: Katryn Dierksen)

Moody Rose Christopher, Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow up to be Cowboys (or Artist for That Matter), (photo credit: Katryn Dierksen)

Moody Rose Christopher, Dark Skies (better a staircase than a basket case), (photo credit: Katryn Dierksen)

IN REVIEW WINTER 2018/19 ALLTHEARTSTL.COM