Exhibition: Re-Configure

15 SEP - 6 OCT, 20 ATKINSON STREET, SOUTH DUNEDIN

In 1971 artist and academics, Mariam Shapiro and Judy Chicago together with students, converted a disused house on the campus at California Institute of the Arts into one of the most important feminist art works Woman House. At the time, all of the terms of reference were new, installation, craft as art, feminism.  The various works installed in the house addressed these concerns and most importantly the lack of gallery representation for female artists.

With this in mind, a group of artists in Dunedin with links to the Dunedin School of Art decided to re-examine some of the concerns that Woman House raised forty –six years ago.   Many of the concerns of the initial exhibition have meant changes to the curriculum for example, the craft -art debate of the eighties has given way to a new materiality. While the initial ideas that circled around an all too essentialist biologically determined subject have been replaced by social constructions and monstrous representation.

The classic problematic of who is looking at whom, and for whose pleasure, has been debated since Laura Mulvey’s article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema became the go to text of the1980’s. Google reports suggest 24 million selfies uploaded in 2016 have exponentially complicated the image of women in western culture. At Dunedin School of Art the ratio of female to male students has been 85-15 during the last 15 years.  The work in the exhibition Re-Configure by artists Shelley McConaughy, Kiri Mitchell, Sarah Baird, Megan Brady, Francine Keech, and Michele Beevors address these issues and so many more.    

Re-Configure will be held in conjunction with the Feminism, Figuration and Sculpture Symposium on 14 September at the Dunedin School of Art.

Re-Configure

VENUE: 20 Atkinson Street South Dunedin.

DATES: 15^th September-6^th October 2017

TIMES: Tuesday to Saturday 10-4