This Beautiful Fight

Exhibitions with Catherine Opie, Alex Prager, Erwin Olaf, Kelli Connell, et al.

          APRIL 2012 NEWSLETTER

I’m pleased to invite you to my upcoming exhibition and lecture at PHOTO CENTER NW April 12 & 13. This will be my first show in the verdant city of my youth, Seattle, Washington. I will be exhibiting 3 photographs and a video from the series On Beauty.

The last six months have been transformative. My work was curated in exhibitions in the US and abroad with Catherine Opie, Alex Prager, Erwin Olaf, Bruce Weber and more. While in Europe for the Museum exhibition No Fashion Please! I had the priviledge of being featured on ARTE, a German TV program. No Fashion Please! received extensive press including Italian Vogue, Wall Street Journal, Die Presse and many more. For those who could not make it to Vienna but are interested to see the show, there is a gorgeously printed hardcover exhibition catalog available  on ArtBook and Amazon.

Presently, I am in residence with the ART & LAW Residency Program run by VLA. We meet bi-monthly for critical seminars and will hold an exhibition this fall. Already, the residency is impacting my practice in unexpected and exciting ways. I look forward to sharing more about this experience and especially the new work with you all. 

Thank you for your continued support.

AUTHOR & SUBJECT – Contemporary Queer Photography
PHOTO CENTER NW  | Seattle, Washington
On View: April 5 – May 27, 2012
Participating artists: Sophia Wallace, Kelli Connell, Rafael Soldi, Katie Koti, Adrain Chesser, Steven Miller, Chad States, Lorenzo Triburgo, Molly Landreth, Amelia Tovey
OPENING RECEPTION  | Thursday, April 12th | 6:00 – 9:00PM
After Party party at the Wild Rose in Capital Hill
LECTURE  | Sophia Wallace & Kelli Connell
Friday, April 13th | 6:30 – 8:00PM

For more information, visit PCNW.org

Sophia Wallace shows with Catherine Opie
View installation photos of A Fine Line: Private Lives for Public View at Colgate University’s Clifford Gallery. In this four person exhibition, Wallace showed 21 works from the autobiographical series Truer with Catherine Opie, Jason Hanasik and JoAnne Santangelo.

No Fashion Please! reviews by Italian Vogue, Wall Street Journal, ARTE TV
At KUNSTHALLE Wien Museum in Vienna, 19 international artists reject traditional notions of fashion, gender and beauty. ‘From Jeff Bark’s painterly and perverse “Flesh Rainbow” to Sophia Wallace’s portraits of feminized male models, these daring and reckless experiments veer closer to the ceremonies and rituals of body art than to fashion.’ Download complete press here. 

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Copyright © 2012 Sophia Wallace Photography, All rights reserved. 

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The Grotesque Spectacle: Art or Exploitation?

As some of you may know, I’m currently in residence with the Art & Law Residency Program. I will be writing on occasion about discourses that come up in the residency and reflecting on legal and critical theory as it relates to my own practice.

Seminar #3 this week focused on Pasolini’s Salo. A film which was controversial from it’s release, Salo remains banned in many countries. Critics have called it the most disturbing film ever made.

From my vantage point, it was difficult to watch. The barrier that allows one to separate a violent spectacle on film, from the violence that exists in the world –  is an illusion. Once you have crossed this barrier, you can’t go back. In the seminar, some residents felt that Salo was minimally disturbing, even boring. This strikes me as a 21st century American view of watching extreme violence on a screen.

Salo was recently referenced by Yvonne Rainer in a strongly worded letter to Jeffrey Deitch. Rainer decryed Marina Abramovic’s planned performance at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s as “grotesque” and “verg[ging] on economic exploitation”. Read the ART INFO piece here. (Thank you for the tip Blaise.)

This controversy brings to the fore the question, can an artist/person choose exploitation and therefore is the person that hired them, off the hook for dubious employment conditions since the worker gave her/his consent? Rainer says clearly, no. “…the egregious associations for the performers, who, though willing, will be exploited nonetheless.” Taking the argument further, if you agree to degrading circumstances out of desperation, does that mean you are being empowered rather than degraded, since you chose to participate? Does the act of choosing slightly better shit make it not shit anymore?

I’m further interested in the slippery question of when sadistic spectacle is art versus exploitation. Rainer has no problem distinguishing a “grotesque spectacle” of dignity, Pasolini’s Salo against Facism, commercialism and the attack on reality in Cinema, from a “grotesque spectacle” by Abramovic and MoCA a upscale fundraiser which creates victims that are not symbolic, but real. Again we return to questions of agency and cost/benefit analysis.

If Abramovic subjects her own body to these conditions in return for recognition of authorship, financial reward and critical acclaim – this is a fair exchange. It’s worth noting that I admire Abramovic’s work with her own body. It’s a different game when the artist – as creative director – hires performers to give over their bodies to sadistic regimes of spectacle in exchange for a few bucks and a pipe dream.

—
Sophia Wallace

No fashion, please! – A scream of refusal

Nineteen solo presentations outline the young international photography scene that explores the fundamental relationship between bodies and clothes, the dialectics between the form of the body and its appearance in the second show of the Kunsthalle Wien’s autumn program focusing on photography and fashion. Borders to other disciplines are crossed in both daring and reckless experiments. In the context of the exhibition, clothes and other products of the fashion industry only figure as fragments of a narrative mise-en-scène thematizing the dreams concerned with a changing aesthetic of the body and its ideals. The media strategies employed are manifold and span from staged photographic images, projections, and performances to body sculptures, video and film works.

Participating artists: Chan-Hyo Bae, Tracey Baran, Jeff Bark, Leigh Bowery/Fergus Greer, Steven Cohen/Marianne Greber, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Matthias Herrmann, Lea Golda Holterman, Izima Kaoru, Luigi & Luca, Sandra Mann, Martin & The evil eyes of Nur, Brigitte Niedermair, Erwin Olaf, Alex Prager, Hanna Putz, Viviane Sassen, Sophia Wallace, Bruce Weber

Curator: Peter Weiermair
Exhibition catalogue: No fashion, please! Fotografie zwischen Gender und Lifestyle | Photography between Gender and Lifestyle. Ed. by Kunsthalle Wien, Gerald A. Matt, Peter Weiermair. With texts by Peter Weiermair and Eugenio Viola; c. 160 pages, German and English; Verlag für moderne Kunst, Nürnberg

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