“Dance movement” is the first piece to capture your attention when you walk into Gallery 151 in Chelsea for Anton Perich’s showing, Painting in the Machine, and it holds your gaze for the entirety of the visit. Even when you look away to see the other works – Many of which resemble brightly woven French beach towels and colorful throws with horizontal lines – your mind still lingers with “Dance Movement.”
There is a special opportunity right now in Chelsea to explore the color blue. Several galleries within walking distance of one another feature predominantly blue or entirely blue works on their walls. Like Anna Friemoth’s “Jae-Hee and Clementine” (2013) at Gallery 151, these shows offer a mesmerizing moment to pause, dwell, and soak in blue like the women decked out in sunglasses in this image.
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ART ON VIEW IN A NEW MANHATTAN HOTEL
Art is the focus at HGU, a hotel that is scheduled to open in early April in Manhattan’s Flatiron district. The HGU was originally the Hotel Grand Union, a Beaux-Arts property that was built in 1905. This incarnation, with 90 rooms, will also be influenced by Beaux-Art design and emphasize contemporary art — the property has partnered with Gallery 151 in Lower Manhattan to oversee rotating art installations in the hotel’s shared spaces and within each of the guest rooms. Works from both emerging and iconic names will be featured including pieces by the Brooklyn-born visual artist Fab 5 Freddy and the Italian-born painter Francesco Clemente. The Brooklyn-based artist Evan Yee is behind the installation in the lobby; called Mirror Mirror, the piece reflects the image of the person looking at it into a background that resembles what the scenery would have been like in 1905.
“She’s a butterface” is a saying meant to convey that everything about a woman is good… but her face. Photographer Anna Friemoth’s literal lens reveals the phrase as the slur that it is.
That’s the thought experiment behind Friemoth’s new collection, “Words for Women.” As Slate highlights, Friemoth takes common phrases associated with women and reimagines them as colorful, literal portraits. “Trophy wife” becomes a stoic woman covered in shiny silver; “wallflower” becomes a woman in a red dress mounted on a wall; “arm candy” becomes a woman covered up in a polka-dot wrapper.
“Arm candy,” “sugar tits,” “butterface” — most of us have heard these names and phrases and others like them, directed towards women. These figures of speech are so innocuous, often cloaked in casual humor, they’re rarely given a second thought. However commonplace, for women on the receiving end being labeled a “trophy wife” or “arm candy” can be both objectifying and insulting. But what would happen if these phrases were interpreted literally? In her latest exhibition, Words For Women, at Gallery 151 in New York City, photographer Anna Friemoth does just that, showing us, in colorful, daring satire, just how absurd gendered insults are.
It’s no secret that language is hardly kind to women; our body parts are synonymous with insults, and the compliments aren’t much better. Either way, everyday phrases reduce women to their bodies again and again — a trend that the photo series Words for Women by Anna Friemoth skewers using cartoonish, surreal portraits of the ways we subtly disparage femininity. Each photograph is a literal depiction of labels for women, from “golddigger” to “sugar t*ts,” and the results highlight just how ridiculous such language can be — but also how important it can be to laugh about it every once in a while
Anyone who’s ever been called a nice piece of “arm candy”, a “pushover” or (God, forbid) “sugar tits”, will know these put-downs are mostly directed at individuals with clits.
There are a fair bunch of insults that, though not technically gendered, are considerably more often aimed at females, like “slut”, “whore” and my all-time favorite: “feminazi”. While there are a few “mansults” out there (insults only aimed at men), it’s fair to say there are arguably less than female-specific put-downs.
What happens when you visualize such gendered snubs? Artist Anna Friemoth has done just that, with a new series lovingly entitled Words for Women. The portraits take sexist insults to a literal level.
Central Saint Martin’s graduate Anna Friemoth builds on her 10 Commandments self-portrait series with a sharp new body of satirical work, Words for Women; currently showing at Gallery 151. If you’ve ever pondered the inanity of labels like ‘Sugar Tits’, or ‘Butter Face’, the American artist’s literal portraits will be viewed with a wry smile.
