This Wicked Tongue
This Wicked Tongue
Curated by Cindy Rehm
October 22 - December 3, 2016
SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)
Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present This Wicked Tongue, a group exhibition curated by Cindy Rehm, with works by Cathy Akers, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Andrea Bowers, Patricia D. Burns, Carolyn Castaño, Alice Lang, Candice Lin, Juliana Paciulli, Ali Prosch, Kaitlynn Redell, Lisa Diane Wedgeworth, Logan White, Jessica Wimbley, and Suné Woods.
We are stormy, and that which is ours breaks loose from us without our fearing and debilitation. Our glances, our smiles, are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths: our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we are not afraid of lacking. What happiness for us who are omitted, brushed aside at the scene of inheritances; we inspire ourselves and we expire without running out of breath, we are everywhere!
- Helene Cixous, Laugh of the Medusa
History is marred by the erasures of women, by pock marks and hollows where the voices of women have been suppressed and silenced. The Biblical saying, “women should be seen and not heard” echoes even today as Hillary Clinton is criticized as shrill and overbearing anytime she raises her voice. Everyday internet trolls harass women with demeaning language and, in extreme cases, threats of violence, death and sexual assault. These aims to subdue a woman’s agency aren’t new, and exist in the continuum of tactics to mute the female voice.
Speech is power: the artists in This Wicked Tongue celebrate unabashed expressions of the female voice like the witches, hysterics, and angry feminists who have come before them. These artists use acid wit, conjuring, and potent symbolic language to render complicated images of female expereince. They won’t smile on command but they will unfurl tongues to lash out, to scream, and sing, and laugh their heads off… to bleed and bleed and bleed… until all is stained by their wondrous, generative flow.
Cindy Rehm is a Los Angeles based artist and an educator. She is the co-founder of Craftswoman House a project dedicated to presenting feminist centered works in Southern California. She is a member of the Association of Hysteric Curators and former Director of the Baltimore installation space spare room. Rehm is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship in Media from the Tennessee State Arts Commission, a Learning to Love You More Grant, and a Faculty Development Grant from Middle Tennessee State University. She is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Art at Chapman University, and an Adjunct Professor in the Visual and Media Arts Department at Long Beach City College.
Rehm’s work in drawing, performance, and video has been shown at national and international venues including: Elephant; Los Angeles, Woman Made Gallery; Chicago, LACE; Los Angeles, Goliath Visual Space; Brooklyn, Paul Robeson Gallery; Rutgers, ARC Gallery; Chicago, Transformer; Washington DC, Interaction IV; Sardinia, Italy, the Archeological Museum; Varna, Bulgaria and at Mains d’Oeuvres; Saint Ouen, France. Rehm’s work may be viewed at cindyrehm.com.
Installation
