WOMENS WORK: KATHERINE DRISCOLL, GIGI GATEWOOD and JORDANNA KALMAN
July 18th - August 25th, 2024
If the medium of photography impacted and perpetuated womxn’s struggle for visibility and self-definition, this presentation beckons the question: what can be learned from contemporary feminist photographers at a time when bodily autonomy is threatened?
Womens Work brings together three artists who render spaces and landscapes of their own making. With an insistence on personal space and a relationship to domesticity, the artists address and deploy the organizing principle of a grid to propose what art historian Rosalind Krauss argued makes artistic work at once autonomous and autotelic, sacred and profane.*
Katherine March Driscoll’s primary subject is exteriors of domestic sites and spaces. Resembling a calendar grid made up of framed images, her presentation of 27 works are from two ongoing series titled With Prospect and With Frost (Life’s a Beach) and View From the Wreck. Conceived as individual images, Driscoll uses ordering and repetition to extend and enrich their meaning. Domestic symbols such as planters, garden beds, and white picket fences dominate and present an archive of a place and time past, seasons, memories, love and loss, portals and boundaries, ends and beginnings.
Gigi Gatewood’s cyanotype monoprints are inspired by her dismantling a broken toy bin that was left out in the rain. Feeling burdened by the stuff of life that piles up, like a ritual of release, Gatewood began to memorialize the byproducts of housework and child rearing. An extension of an ongoing exploration of power, artifacts, and politics of belief, the bin’s bones and skin became the first source objects for the series titled Frame and Sack. The works are produced by building and photographing still life sets and sculptures and are made from digital negatives that then get exposed to sunlight and toned. The cyanotype process transports these mundane objects into ghostly ethereal images that define stages of meaning, and, in some cases, become altars.
Jordanna Kalman’s photographs are from a recent series titled kiddie pool and ten times I felt sad in august. Originally shot on expired polaroid film, kiddie pool captures the artist reclaiming the beauty of rippling, sunlit water in a child’s pool that she infuses with flowers from her garden. ten times I felt sad in august documents a period of ten days when Kalman was going through depression. Finding herself staring out the window and unable to leave her home, the artist produced the series as a way of charting this way of being and connecting to the world on her terms.
*Rosalind Krauss, “Grids” October Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979), pp. 50-64 (15 pages) MIT Press.
Katherine March Driscoll (b. 1986, Rochester, NY) is a photographer and archivist working in Germantown, NY. Her work was recently included in a two-person exhibition Every Love Has Its Landscape, curated by Emily McElwreath, at Standard Space (Sharon, CT); and T(HERE), a group exhibition at CREATE Council on the Arts (Catskill, NY). Driscoll was awarded residencies at Stoveworks in Chattanooga, TN (2021), where she self-published an edition of handmade books (2021); and Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY where she also was the education fellow (2014). She received an MFA in Imaging Arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and a BFA in photography and ceramics from the NYSCC at Alfred University. She is currently a Lecturer in Creative Arts at Siena College.
Gigi Gatewood’s (b. 1980, Buffalo, NY) photographs, video, and sculpture explore histories of objects, the power of belief, and the ways in which we reckon with the unknown. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Invisible Exports, Aperture Gallery, and the Chelsea Art Museum (all New York, NY); Carrol and Sons (Boston, MA); David Cunningham Projects, Krowswork Gallery and Femina Potens Art Gallery (all San Francisco, CA); the Albright Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY); and the Katherine E.Nash Gallery (Minneapolis, MN). Gatewood participated in collaborative video and performance artist projects at the 2009 Venice Biennale and the 2003 Havana Biennial. In 2019, her collaborative dance work merging live performance, sound, and video premiered at The New Hazlett Theater in Pittsburgh, PA. After receiving an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI), Gatewood received the William J. Fulbright Fellowship and spent a year researching and documenting Trinidad and Tobago islands’ complex spiritual landscape. Gatewood is currently Associate Professor of Visual Art & Design at Siena College in Albany, NY. She lives and works in the Hudson Valley.
Jordanna Kalman (b.1977) is an artist and photographer who explores her relationship to male dominated history of photography. Her practice entails finding the best way to express visually whatever it is she’s feeling at that particular time. Jordanna works on many different things very slowly all at once. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and extensively online. In 2022 she had a solo exhibition at Blue Sky Gallery at the Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts, and she was a Critical Mass finalist in both 2020 and 2018. She recently self published a book titled Index 2014-2024, spanning ten years worth of her photographic series. She received an MA in photography from London College of Communication, UK and a BFA in photography from Purchase College, NY. She lives and works in New York.