{"id":21233,"date":"2013-06-06T11:55:41","date_gmt":"2013-06-06T17:55:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=21233"},"modified":"2020-03-19T09:24:35","modified_gmt":"2020-03-19T15:24:35","slug":"work-to-do-byu-jann-haworth-trent-alvey-amy-jorgensen-pam-bowman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/work-to-do-byu-jann-haworth-trent-alvey-amy-jorgensen-pam-bowman\/","title":{"rendered":"Work to Do @ BYU: Jann Haworth, Trent Alvey, Amy Jorgensen, Pam Bowman"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"worktodo\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1975, British feminist artist Mary Kelly, along with Margaret Harrison and Kay Hunt, completed a comprehensive conceptual art project called\u00a0Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry.<\/em>\u00a0 Part sociological study, part conceptual art, the book and documentation indexed the lives and daily schedules of the nearly 150 female employees at a metal box factory in Bermondsey.<\/p>\n

Like so many of Kelly\u2019s futures practices, what\u00a0Women and Work<\/em>\u00a0reveals through near obsessive note taking are the everyday duties and monotonous tasks that make up the lived experiences of women\u2019s lives: clocking in, clocking out, cooking, cleaning, getting up, going to bed. \u00a0Such documentation, as a collective picture, not only communicates basic sociological information about gendered labor division found in the 1970s England or what Mierle Laderman Ukeles calls \u201cthe back half of life,\u201d but also reflects the way these daily tasks amount to what becomes much of our living, of ourselves.<\/p>\n

For Kelly, a feminist artist, the work to do was not just an artistic gesture, but also a political one, to make evident the daily labor of the British working class woman and through that visibility, to validate and to evaluate the lived experience of that community.\u00a0 And to enact real social change in the landscape of sexual politics, or at the very least, to comment on it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Similarly, women and work is the topic of BYUMOA\u2019s newest exhibition.\u00a0 Titled\u00a0Work to Do: Trent Alvey, Pam Bowman, Jann Haworth and Amy Jorgensen<\/em>, the exhibition provides a venue to four prominent female artists working in Utah today.\u00a0 Curator Jeff Lambson says the exhibit \u201dexplores narratives such as domesticity, environment, cinema, motherhood, ritual, and body. Investigating questions and issues linked to the notions of \u2018women\u2019s work,\u2019 the exhibition examines the unique ways each artist navigates the gender politics of the Beehive State.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within this frame,\u00a0Work To Do<\/em>\u00a0can be thought of as a feminist show, and specifically a regional one; and perhaps one of the first to be hung at BYU, and hung with bravado, boldly filling the main gallery. Such an examination certainly has social currency. From the Boston Globe to the bloggersphere, to protest movements on Facebook, feminism is in the air in Utah.<\/p>\n

Yet, the religious and cultural idiosyncrasies of those debates and the specific identities they address are set aside in exchange for a broader lens regarding the variety of lived experiences that make up the diverse cultural landscape of the collective artists. For each artist is quite different from the others. Not only in their diverse artistic practices but also the topics in which they engage and as such, the show conjures a sense of multiplicity rather than a false construction of a shared unity.<\/p>\n

To be clear, I think it would be a misstep to narrowly label this specifically a feminist show. In part, because feminist art can often slide into didacticism, championing activism over aesthetics (and this show does not).\u00a0 Additionally, each artist understands and perceives what exactly is the \u201cwork to be done\u201d varies. \u00a0Artist Jann Haworth explains, \u201cI don’t take the view [that] we as female artists have ‘work to do’ for feminism. If we chose that subtext , we do so out of\u00a0a sense . . . of injustice. It is not our day job. What I mean is that one is not holding the job of feminist looking\u00a0for topics to crusade about. It is not the central subject. Creative thought is the central drive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Creative she is. One of the leading figures of the British Pop Art movement, Haworth is by far the most successful of the four artists on exhibit. Former UMFA curator Jill Dawsey described her as \u201cthe most important artist living in Utah today\u201d \u2014 strong words, not parsed along gendered lines. Her beautiful and strange sculptures, like \u201cCharm Bracelet\u201d and \u201cOld Lady\u201d disfigures the confines of the flat rectangular canvas. \u00a0Rather, Haworth sews it, stuffs it and molds it into soft sculptural canvas forms whose shapes often expose gendered tropes or poke fun at the art historical canon.\u00a0 Such gestures flatten hierarchical boundaries of high and low subject matter and materials, with all of the strength of Pop art\u2019s trademark tongue in cheek irony.<\/p>\n

In the neighboring gallery, one encounters 1,000 partially eaten pink marshmallows lined up neatly on a shelf that wraps across three walls. Some are half-eaten, others nearly consumed, and some bear only bite-marks. Above this sugary sweet wasteland, are 1,000 pigment prints of Amy Jorgensen in the process of eating, hesitating, considering.\u00a0 They read as mug shots documenting the various expressions and emotions of having eaten when one should have abstained.
\nThe work references the well-known Stanford University study called \u201cMarshmallow Test,\u201d which measured delayed gratification in children as an indicator for more successful lives.\u00a0 But on a deeper level, Jorgensen\u2019s work grapples with ideas of food guilt and body image, an issue especially gendered.\u00a0 It is well documented that our American culture has a near clinical obsession with being thin and yet, our society chronically overeats, indulges, refusing to delay, to wait. As such, junk food is often (and absurdly) equated with sin.<\/p>\n

One need only drive down I-15 to see that this is especially the case in Utah. As Lambson explains, \u201cUtah is often called one of the happiest (often an indicator of success) in the nation,\u201d he said, \u201cbut we live in a state that has some of the highest rates in the nation of plastic surgery, suicide, depression, stress, and prescription drug abuse.\u201d Utah then, is wrapped in paradox and Jorgensen\u2019s piece painfully reveals these tensions and pressures for perfection that exist, here, and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Trent Alvey\u2019s \u201cThe Very Large Bride\u2019s Dress,\u201d made almost entirely of bubble wrap, outfitted with plastic chains for the straps and train. \u00a0On one hand, it is a massive and ironic tribute to Bridezilla, focused on the ephemeral, the superficial, the fleeting.\u00a0 Yet, one can also see it as a shielding material designed for the protection of something fragile, something sacred. And there\u2019s always the idea of marriage as the old ball and chain.<\/p>\n

For Terry Tempest Williams, who wrote about the exhibition for its catalog, it is a sign of the end of the world, where our environments are covered in waste, in materials that won\u2019t decompose, that wrap us and warp us away from the organic. So Alvey makes messy work, in the sense that the meaning is not fixed, in the sense that it causes a disruption.\u00a0 For it is not simply about dressmaking (although that is there too) but about the various ways we project meaning onto others and onto ourselves.<\/p>\n

Finally, at the entrance of the exhibition, is Pam Bowman\u2019s breathtaking sculpture \u201cBecoming.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>At first sight, the viewer is met with a free-standing wall from which a series of straggly strings hang, seemingly haphazard and insignificant, almost like an Eva Hesse sculpture. Yet, walk to the side and to the back, and what emerges is tons of beautiful taut rope pulled in a dramatic diagonal, all leading to a massive and magnificent basket weaved spool of nautical rope.
\nCollectively each small strand builds the nest, builds the (art) work. For Bowman, the piece reflects the chaos and messiness of everyday domestic experience that when pulled together collectively builds something meaningful.\u00a0 It is a celebration of domesticity and an homage to the heritage of the so-called feminine arts like basket weaving, embroidery, sewing. \u00a0Work that can be picked up, stopped, squeezed in. In fact, for Bowman the exhibition\u2019s title is somewhat of a mission statement and a rigorous and serious reclamation of the marginalized and dismissed domestic life of so many women.<\/p>\n

In this regard, she differs from Haworth, Jorgensen, and Alvey. And it should be clear that these four women do not constitute a homogenous perspective. They each come from different backgrounds, are involved in different life experiences. Their work is different, distinct, all its own.\u00a0 Yet, when seen as a collective, certain themes emerge. One is a emphasis on softness: marshmallows, bubble wrap, fabric, rope. The other perhaps more closely echoes Kelly\u2019s\u00a0Women and Work:<\/em>\u00a0that is, a desire to document and to make a record of one\u2019s self, one\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

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