My Flannel Knickers

October 30 - December 5, 2020

My Flannel Knickers

October 30 - December 5, 2020

Victoria Dugger • Nash Glynn • Bessie Harvey • Cielo Félix-Hernández • Naomi Lisiki • Athena Papadopoulos • Honoré Sharrer • Sarah Slappey • Willa Wasserman

The anonymous protagonist of “My Flannel Knickers”, the 1950s short story by British-born Mexican artist and writer Leonora Carrington, was once “a great beauty, and attended all sorts of cocktail-drinking, prize-giving-and-taking, artistic demonstrations and other casually hazardous gatherings organized for the purpose of people wasting other people’s time.”[1]  But her “ardent heart” impedes her ability to retain her forced demeanor and gradually her teeth decay and her faces begins to slide from its bones from the strain of smiling.  

Eventually, the narrator gets her face fixed and inhabits a terrifying “jungle of faces” suspended on “ballast” bodies that live in “constant misery and supplication” to the faces, while draped in “colours and shapes in current ‘fashion’.”  The faces believe the narrator to hold special knowledge and supply of the cosmic wool from which their features are formed, and in order to escape them the narrator attacks a policeman and is removed from society.  Later, the narrator is declared a Saint and installed on a traffic island shrine, which is where we first encounter the flannel knickers of the story’s title—suspended on a traffic light at a busy intersection where she is eternally installed.

The strange and alien world of the story is, of course, merely a distorted mirror of our own, and the tale a fable of the expectations and constrictions of a world based on appearance.  The nine artists in this group exhibition span sculpture, installation, drawing, prints and painting, examining the angles by which women and female-identifying people are defined and restricted by their bodies, abilities, beauty, age and societal expectations of normalcy. Carrington’s narrator eschews the confines of the corporeal, asking instead what happens when a once beautiful face becomes merely a mask—is it imbued with the same strange power?  Will the “face-eating contest” continue?  Is the only escape removal from society?  And even in this supposed isolation, surrounded by frenetic machine movement, are we forced to weave and unweave our own avatars anew every day?

[1] Carrington, Leonora. “My Flannel Knickers.” The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, Dorothy Project, 2017, p. 158. 

Victoria Dugger (b. 1991, Columbus, Georgia) is a visual artist living and working in Athens, Georgia. She is currently a MFA candidate at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. Dugger’s practice advocates for the disabled body and seeks to replace historical pain with pleasure. Her work interrogates beliefs and attitudes towards one’s own purpose in relation to society, normality, and empathy. Her work has been exhibited at The Athens Institute of Contemporary Art, Athens, GA; the Rochester Institute of Technology, NY; The Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN; The John F. Kennedy Center for The Performing Arts, Washington D.C; and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ. Her work has been reviewed in the New American Paintings South Edition and the Arden Literary Journal.

Nash Glynn (b. 1992, Miami, Florida) is a transdisciplinary artist living in New York City and Miami. Glynn uses her body as a medium, utilizing self-portraiture to interrogate concepts of female, nature, and representation. Glynn received her MFA from Columbia University in 2017, and BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in 2014. Glynn had her first solo exhibition at PARTICIPANT INC., in NY in 2019. Her work has been included in group exhibitions and screenings including those at Judson Memorial Church, NY; The Leslie-Lohman Museum, NY; Marinaro Gallery, NY; Raumerweiterungshalle, Berlin, Germany and Queer Experimental Film Festival. Glynn is the recipient of the 2017 Leslie-Lohman Museum Queer Artist Fellowship.

Bessie Harvey (b. 1929, Dallas, GA – d. 1994, Alcoa, TN) was an American sculptor and found object artist. After divorcing her husband, Harvey and her eleven children relocated to Alcoa, TN. While working as a housekeeper, Harvey made found object sculptures in hopes of making supplemental income. The intense spiritual nature of Harvey’s sculptures is directly linked with her belief in transcendentalism and God’s divine presence is the true artist. Harvey’s work exemplifies the Black vernacular art practice from the American South, which constitutes a cross of religious thematic elements, found objects, and assemblage-like construction. Her work is in the permanent collection of many major museum collections across the United States, including the Whitney Museum of Art, NY; The Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, CA; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX; The Tennessee Museum of Art, Nashville, TN; The Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN, and The American Folk Art Museum, NY. Harvey was featured in the 1995 Whitney Biennale. 

Cielo Félix-Hernández (b.1998, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Richmond, Virginia. Working primarily in painting, their work aims to visualize and practice decolonial ways of performing identity and reclaiming narratives. They respond to past and ongoing colonization and to the effects of displacement on the psyche that have disrupted practices of self-care. Felix-Hernandez received their BFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2020. Their work was included in a group exhibition at PS122 Gallery in New York in 2019 and was included in documento, a group exhibition at Embajada in San Juan, Puerto Rico in October 2020.

Naomi Lisiki (b.1997, Guadeloupe, French Caribbean) is a visual artist living and working in Brooklyn. Inspired by philosophy and logistics, and dealing with themes of permutation and metamorphosis, her work explores and aims to comprehend the passage of time in relation to our emotions. Lisiki received her B.F.A in Fine Arts from The Cooper Union in 2018 and her M.F.A in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2020. She is currently a resident at the studio program, ArtCake, in Brooklyn.

Athena Papadopoulos (b. 1988, Toronto, Canada) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Hull, England. Papadopoulos makes wildly image-laden, mixed media sculptures and works on canvas, utilizing techniques including collage, drawing, and sewing, and unusual materials such as mustard, Pepto-Bismol, and shoe polish, in combination with family photographs, magazine clippings, her own drawings, and various fabrics. Through her work, Papadopoulos explores our penchant for revelry and indulgence, as well as the trappings of rebellion—like dyed hair or tattoos—and their appropriation and taming by mainstream commercial culture. She completed her MFA at Goldsmiths, London in 2013 and has recently had solo exhibitions at MOSTYN, Llandudno, Wales; Liebaert Projects, Kortijk, Belgium; Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, Portugal; Humber Street Gallery, Hull, UK; Emalin, London, UK; CURA Basement Roma, Rome, IT; and Shoot the Lobster, NY. Her work has recently been included in group exhibitions at Project Artbeat, Tbilisi, Georgia; Miettinen Collection, Berlin, DE; Fondazione Rocco Guglielmo, Bologna, IT; Soft Opening, London, UK; Berthold Pott, Cologne, DE; and the Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK. Her work has been reviewed by the New York Times, Artsy, CURA, Frieze, and Art Monthly.

Honoré Sharrer (b. 1920, West Point, New York – d. 2009, Washington D.C.) was an American painter who rose to prominence in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1949, Mademoiselle Magazine named Honoré Sharrer “Woman Artist of the Year” and in 1951, she had a solo exhibition at New York’s prestigious Knoedler Gallery, where her five-panel work, Tribute to the American Working People (1946–51), attracted favorable critical praise. The first dozen years of Sharrer’s career promised a successful, high profile future, but the acclaim faded in part by McCarthyism and partly by her adherence to figural art in the face of the dominance of abstract expressionism in the 1950s and ‘60s. Her “rediscovery,” after her death, and recent touring museum exhibition, A Dangerous Woman: Subversion and Surrealism in the Art of Honoré Sharrer (Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA), are similarly the result of social forces that are now encouraging the reexamination of an under-recognized body of work and of major talents unfairly ignored. Her work can be found in many notable public collections across the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, and the University of Virginia Art Museum, Charlottesville, VA.

Sarah Slappey (b. 1984, Columbia, South Carolina) is a painter based in Brooklyn. Her paintings address the female form as both seductive and grotesque, bothembracing femininity and rejecting of its limits. Slappey received her MFA from Hunter College in 2016. She has recently had solo exhibitions at Maria Bernheim Gallery, Zurich, CH and Sargent’s Daughters, NY. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Schlossmuseum, Linz, Austria; Carl Kostyal Gallery, London, UK; Deanna Evans Projects, NY; Andrew Edlin Gallery, NY. Slappey’s work has been reviewed by The New Yorker, The Art Newspaper, Artnet, Artsy, ArtSpace, and Flash Art. She is represented by Sargent’s Daughters.    

Willa Wasserman (b.1990, Evansville, Indiana) is a visual artist living and working in Los Angeles. Wasserman, who has a background in metalworking, uses painting as both medium and critique. Combining their painting and metalworking practices, they play with variations of traditional, art-historical techniques, exploring the limits of self-conception and representation. They received their MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019. Wasserman’s work has recently been exhibited at Downs & Ross, NY; Park View / Paul Soto, LA; and The Gallery, LA. In addition to their solo practice, Wasserman is also a part of the collaborative painting group En Plein Error alongside Jenny Gagalka and Beaux Mendes. Their work has been reviewed in Contemporary Art Daily and Art in America.