“Upend: Female Experience and Activism”
by Liz Goldner
Angels Gate Culture Center Gallery, San Pedro, California
Exhibition continues through August 17, 2025
August 10, 2024
Sheli Silverio, “Be A Lady,” 2019, watercolor on Arches paper, dimensions variable. Photo by Jordan Rodriguez.
“Upend: Female Experience and Activism,” a group show by eight female artists and one collective, addresses issues that women continue to endure today in spite of progress overcoming oppression. These include ageism, sexism, racism, archaic ideas of womanhood, reactions to hypertoxic masculinity, sub-par medical care for women of color, systems of power, the defamation of female genitalia, and more. With these issues in mind, “Upend” explores both the inner personal lives of women and their outward expressions of resistance.
Sheli Silverio’s “Be a Lady” (2019), a large watercolor collage, upends the title’s expression, which urges girls, in the voice of their mothers, to act like proper ladies. The artist explains, “’’Be a lady’ is a phrase I heard a lot growing up. I never felt like I knew what that meant exactly, but I did feel like I was often doing it wrong.” While employing the paper doll model to construct her installation, Silverio inverts the ladylike mandate to embrace macabre symbols of sexuality, vulnerability and motherhood. The centerpiece is a nearly nude, smiling, zaftig paper-doll woman, surrounded by a paper-doll dildo, a prosthetic leg, a bruised, naked pregnant belly, a mirror, old-fashioned hair rollers, and the faces of the artist and of Princess Diana. The piece provokes awareness of how much we and our female ancestors have been subjugated by women, not just by men. Another large paper doll, “The Fool,” is a more rebellious woman, depicted here as a fairytale witch/goddess.
Ibuki Kuramochi, “ID-Phase 1,” and “ID-Phase 2,” 2023.
Ibuki Kuramochi’s “Id-Phase 1 & 2” (both 2023), wildly colored abstract paintings on metal, are initially disorienting, considering that they represent the female form and the womb. These tempestuous images are especially difficult to reckon with considering the barrage of advertising images we are routinely exposed to. The artist uses these images to explore the dissociations of selfhood, enabling the female form to be transformed into unbounded states of being. The complementary video, “Talk to Her” (2024), employs similar, fluid images to “open a dialogue about the evolution of female identity and the negotiation between empowerment and vulnerability.” Considering the artist’s Japanese heritage and its cultural patriarchy, Kuramochi is reclaiming her own femininity with this work. All three works are magnificent examples of a contemporary version of abstract expressionism, flowing organically from the artist’s subconscious.
Elyse Pignolet, “No Gods, No Masters,” 2023, ceramics. Courtesy of the artist and Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo by Jordan Rodriguez.
Master ceramicist Elyse Pignolet contributes an installation, “No Gods, No Masters” (2023), that is positioned on the back wall of the gallery. At first glance, the blue and white ceramic sculpture, with its ornate china painting, free-standing vases and plates, and images of birds and plants, seems to be a traditional decorative work. But it is transformed into an unapologetic, political confrontation with specific words and images painted onto the ceramics describing systems of power that oppress women. Painted images such as a tampon, a speculum, and false eyelashes are paired with the words and phrases with the assertive “ME TOO,” and the slurs, “Will She Ever Shut Up,” “Bitch,” and “Prude.”
Suzanna Scott, “Coin Cunts (blues),” 2024, 21 kisslock coin purses, thread, map tacks, 23 x 23 x 2” overall.
Suzanna Scott’s clever title, “Coin Cunts” (2024), is bestowed on a series of vintage coin purses of various sizes and shapes tacked to the wall to form a tight circle. Each of these individual objects are powerful, elegant depictions of female genitalia. Each purse is distinctly different from all of the others, each a symbol of female individuality and empowerment, seeking to know and express her own voice, even as their arrangement also symbolizes how women collectively suffer the effects of sexual exploitation, genital mutilation, and vast disparities in reproductive health.
Andrea Patrie, “Time to Prepare for What's Coming Your Way,” 2023, oil on canvas, 30 x 48”.
Also notable are layered paintings of women with surreal aspects and large eyes by Andrea Patrie. She addresses her growing invisibility as an aging woman and her daughter’s coming of age in a difficult world. Kennedi Carter’s photos of her pregnant self, with a prosthetic womb attached to her belly, address the patriarchal tradition that minimizes Black women’s high susceptibility to postpartum depression, heightened maternal mortality rate, and sub-par medical care.
Kennedi Carter “Hidden Mother 2,” 2022, archival pigment print, 31 x 38”. Courtesy of the artist and ROSEGALLERY, Santa Monica.
This exhibition asserts that while women’s instinctive nature has been exploited and held back for generations, women today have the tools to save themselves, to claim their own voices, and to mine the collective memory of many heroic women. The art presented in “Upend” demonstrates that art is among the most effective of those tools.
