Temporary Residence


Craftswoman House is pleased to announce Temporary Residence, a series of feminist centered projects and events. Temporary Residence will inhabit found domestic and public spaces in and around Los Angeles to present innovative site-specific works. From 2010 to 2012, Craftswoman House presented visual art, performance, dance and film in an historic Craftsman House in Pasadena. Temporary Residence continues Craftswoman House'mission to honor the rich legacy of feminist art in Southern California. 

Temporary Residence seeks feminist collaborators...

Do you have a hall closet, spare room, garage or other domestic space where you could host a project?

Have a curatorial proposal or idea for a show?

We want to hear from you!

contact Cindy Rehm at cindyrehm@gmail.com

Follow the project at the Temporary Residence blog. 


Five Offerings



Five Offerings was a recreation of Liebestod, which was created and performed by Cheri Gaulke and Barbara T. Smith in 1977 as part of  Suzanne Lacy's Three Weeks in May. This iteration was presented as part of Lacy's Three Weeks in January and featured performances by Launa Bacon, Sara Fowler, Linda Ravenswood, and Cindy Rehm.

Documentation of the performance is posted here.

Bloodlines



Still from Katie Cercone’s Daddy in Furs, 2010

Bloodlines
an evening of video & performance

Katie Cercone, Audrey Chan, Jeseca Dawson,
Jessica Dolence, Kara Hearn, Gelare Khoshgozaran,
Michele Jaquis, Melissa Potter,
Linda Ravenswood, and Nooshin Rostami

Curated by Launa Bacon and Cindy Rehm

Saturday December 3, 7-9pm

929 North Oakland Ave, Pasadena, CA 91104

Craftswoman House is honored to present Bloodlines, an evening of video and performance from 7-9pm in conjunction with the closing of the exhibition Stemma. Like the matriarchs of the second-wave, these artists make work that reflects women’s lives and experiences. They explore subjects of gender, identity, domestic life, and the female body, through video and performance.

Daddy in Furs, Katie Cercone’s contemporary version of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, is a playful narrative about gender, race, and class, as two androgynous youths grapple with issues of idealized love. Daddy in Furs satires the affairs of the consumer doomed to privatize what is actually a collective experience of isolation and escape. Cercone’s Queen Candy Bile records a private act of (trans)aggression acted out against a duo of tween heartthrobs. The work recalls the artist’s tortured bulimic youth and paints a rainbow sherbet bridge between the consumption of sweets, icons, and popular music, as she turns them into a prosthetic boyfriend.

Audrey Chan is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and educator whose work addresses civic discourse, rhetoric, and the feminist construct of “the personal is political.” She will perform her homage to feminist powerhouse Judy Chicago.

Jeseca Dawson is a video performance artist and photographer who explores issues around systemic violence in American culture. Her video, Girlfriend I depicts a M.I.L.F. gone wild in an ecstatic expression of patriotism in her own kitchen. The work is inspired by second-wave feminist video art that focuses on issues around identity and self-worth.

Jessica Dolence’s Drift negotiates the space between land and water through non-linear narratives and hybridized digital abstractions. Maya Deren’s At Land plays on the television, as an audible rhythm echoes through the space calling up images of the sea. The landscape becomes dislocated as Deren moves and adapts to a new territory.

Kara Hearn’s E.T. is part of her series Reincarnated Scenes. The series features her efforts to degrade and venerate the heroics of Hollywood movies through reenactments. She uses the most straightforward techniques of cinema to recreate narratives that are stripped of everything but the pathos inherent in the medium.

In The Playfulness of Being Amnesiac I, Gelare Khoshgozaran recreates a game that was popular in the schools of Iran where she was born and raised. Reminiscent of the Halloween game of bobbing for apples, a person tries to bite an apple hanging from a string that is held by another person who has relative agency and control over it. Khoshgozaran recontextualizes the game as a performance in her studio, showing the exhaustion and dizziness of the obsessive action. The repetition of the gesture has a numbing effect that creates a condition of amnesia, allowing one to forget the pain, endure, and repeat the struggle.

Michele Jaquis’ unitl i can speak my mind was inspired by a recurring dream that she and her twin sister had for several years. “In the dream we are chewing gum and no matter how much gum we attempt to remove from our mouths there is always too much still inside. My sister believes that once she is given, or gives herself, permission to voice her opinion about a pressing issue, the dreams subside.”

Melissa Potter’s Boy Brides & Bachelors is an animated video shot on a cold January night in Southeastern Serbia during a ritual called Surovar in which men dress as women and engage in pretend sexual acts with village bachelors. Potter uses stop motion animation to engage questions about the underlying meanings of the ritual, as she brings attention to her inability to translate the mysterious pagan ceremony, and complicated nuances of gender itself.

Linda Ravenswood recollects detritus of her life in the city of Los Angeles, through impressionistic works that are part narrative and part ceremony. Her performance When my back is turned, explores a desire to engage her memories of “otherness” through a tension between immobility and growth.

As a woman artist from Iran, Nooshin Rostami’s art practice explores the doubts, questions, and fears that she never dared to express inside her home country. Her video Prayer, questions the “godly duties” that are foisted upon young Muslim boys and girls, as they are expected to faithfully assume their religious obligations. The video juxtaposes a recording of Azan -the call for prayer- from Iranian national TV, with a private ritual.

Stemma



Stemma
Ursula Brookbank, Betsy Davis, Jessica Dolence,
Park McArthur, Alyce Haliday McQueen, Angela Simione,
Lisa Wiscombe and Liz Young

Curated by Launa Bacon and Cindy Rehm

November 11 - December 3, 2011
Opening reception: Friday November 11, 7-9pm
Closing: Saturday December 3, 7-9pm

929 North Oakland Ave, Pasadena, CA 91104
Open by appointment only, contact: craftswomanhouse@gmail.com

Craftswoman House is honored to present Stemma, a group exhibition featuring the work of Ursula Brookbank, Betsy Davis, Jessica Dolence, Park McArthur, Alyce Haliday McQueen, Angela Simione, Lisa Wiscombe and Liz Young. The exhibition will run from November 11 to December 3, with a closing featuring Bloodlines, an evening of video and performance from 7-9pm.

A stemma is a recorded genealogy of a family, or a family tree. The works included in Stemma reference the history of feminist art, and all of these artists can be seen as the progeny of second-wave feminism. Like the matriarchs of the second-wave, these artists make work that reflects women’s lives and experiences. They explore subjects of gender, identity, domestic life, and the female body, through video, painting, sculpture, and text.

See images from the opening here.

Ursula Brookbank will present SHE WORLD, a continuing accumulation of relics and ephemera from the lives of women. Many of the items of feminine detritus are culled from the inhibiting post WWII era. Others reveal a woman’s effort for self-expression through arts, crafts, and homemaking. The archive creates an environment for the contemplation of the private histories that are contained within these artifacts of women’s daily lives.
http://www.ursulabrookbank.com

Along with her plastic sculptures, Betsy Davis will display her photographic series, Menstruation as a Glorified Event, a collaboration with Niels Alpert. Davis finds that menstruation has been seen in the media as something unclean or bothersome. In these images, Davis makes the act of bleeding sexy and alluring through visual stylization and as she celebrates a woman’s ability to procreate.
www.queenofplastics.com

Jessica Dolence’s work often shows a female character in an isolated and eerie place. Her digitally constructed animations are super-saturated and nostalgic of toys made for little girls. Her video installation, The Dying Room features a young Medusa who is seduced by the glow of a television. Dolence sets the work in a living room, originally the parlor where families mourned their deceased. Her characters are old monsters whose identity was formed out of fear. www.jessicadolence.com

With her text-based pieces, Park McArthur questions the ways personal mobility is tied to social and political movements. These works filter lived experience through theories and practices of feminism, disability justice movements, and queer communities. Second-wave feminist art's commitment to personal lived experience as a platform for creative work grounds and guides her artistic practice.
www.parkmcarthur.com

In her video, I Love The Nightlife, Alyce Haliday McQueen uses dark humor to question expectations placed upon women in public and private life. She explores the myth of the modern super-woman who must maintain her composure under constant scrutiny of the male gaze. www.alycehalidaymcqueen.com

Angela Simione examines the personal as political in her use of traditional craft as a means of diary keeping. Simione states, “For it is still radical for a woman to speak about her own experience of the world, and it is still unseemly for a woman to speak a certain way in public. It is still unwelcome, still threatening for a woman to honestly and intimately discuss her own life as a subject worthy of interest and investigation. This, as an assertion of worth, stands in direct opposition to the Status Quo. It is still discursive, still divisive, still upsetting. It is a voice that many people still choose to deride, make fun of, or simply ignore. Even private texts as seemingly innocuous as a diary are viewed with suspicion and the keeper often scoffed at or viewed as secretive and untrustworthy.”
http://angelasimione.weebly.com/

Lisa Wiscombe will present a tile installation inspired by Victorian floral patterns. This work continues her Spreads series, which features pornographic imagery that is embedded into the banal surface of the domestic environment. She poses the question, “If walls could speak, what would they say?” http://www.lisawiscombe.com/

Liz Young’s practice incorporates a diverse range of materials, from industrial goods to household ephemera. She often explores issues of the flesh in relation to the human body and the natural world. With her recent series of tiny meat paintings, Young references domestic duties, as well as the miniature foods produced for dollhouses. The works are visceral, but also disarming due to their intimate scale.
http://www.youngproduce.com

image: I Love the Nightlife, video still, Alyce Haliday McQueen, 2011

Womyn Perform



Womyn Perform

Wednesday, November 2, 8pm

Thomas P. Kelly Student Art Gallery
Loyola Marymount University
1 LMU Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90045

Join Craftswoman House in an evening of performance
in collaboration with the artists of Womynhouse.

See documentation of the performances here.

Cut with the Kitchen Knife II




Cut With the Kitchen Knife II
Sunday, October 16, 2011
3:00pm-5:00pm


Craftswoman House
929 North Oakland Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91104

Come channel the spirit of Hannah Höch with an afternoon of collage making at Craftswoman House. You are welcome to bring magazines & other collage materials to use and share. For additional information, contact cindyrehm@gmail.com.

This event is presented in conjunction with The Big Draw LA.

See images from the event here.

Body Stories




Body Stories
An evening of dance, performance, and film

Saturday, October 8, 2011
8pm

Craftswoman House
929 North Oakland Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91104

This event is free and open to the public

On Saturday, October 8, the domestic interior of Craftswoman House will host Body Stories, an evening of dance, performance, and film curated by choreographer and performer Christine Suarez. The event will feature nine California-based artists who engage the body and intimate narratives to explore complex issues of identity. This collection of site-specific work aims to erase the boundaries between the audience and the performer through the experience of shared personal space.

The evening begins with a burial ceremony conducted by Arianne Hoffmann and Audrey Malone to celebrate the passing of old hopes, outdated dreams, and past aspirations. A dance by Rebecca Alson-Milkman features a re-enactment of her mother’s death, and encourages the emotional traces to become present as her identity as daughter and caretaker become obsolete. In a participatory performance that pushes the limits of consent, Allison Wyper investigates how the sexualized female body can deflect moral scrutiny by becoming a spectacle that obscures a genuine understanding of pain. Ally Voye premieres Carry, a short dance film that alters the viewer’s perspective through a fragmentation of the body, and the unexpected impact of outsiders. The evening also includes Pat Payne’s personal weather front, a portable performance of pre-mendous proportions, along with works by Greg Barnett, Rebecca Pappas, Carol McDowell, and Kai Hazelwood.


Top image: Allison Wyper, photograph by Jennifer Monge
Bottom image: Still from Rebecca Alson-Milkman's You Know Where to Reach Me, photograph by Lillian Wu

See documentation of the event here.