D-Magazine reviews "Breathing Amongst Werewolves"

Eve Hill-Agnus

Eve Hill-Agnus reviews our group show in her D-Magazine Article for January 2023.

 

Breathing Amongst Werewolves

In numerous ways, this exhibition at one of Dallas’s newer galleries takes as its starting point the question “What are they so afraid of?” The intelligently installed group show probes bodies and boundaries and draws a parallel between contemporary culture and “the medieval symbolic meaning of a werewolf as an abusive patriarchal power.” The female or female-identifying artists push back against the patriarchy and its strictures through a celebration of self.

M. Florine Démosthène’s mylar cut-outs mirror a body but suggest celestial vastness. In an installation by Beya Gille Gacha, pairs of disembodied children’s feet made of black and blue beads applied in traditional Cameroonian fashion peek out from beneath a sheer, white curtain—a haunting presence in a corner.

Barbara Hammer, the late radical, lesbian documentary filmmaker, was a family friend, and it was with astonishment that I saw vintage prints of her stills and learned there would be a screening on Jan. 14 of excerpts of her filmic work, rarely screened outside museum exhibitions and film festivals. (Houston is the closest place her work has been shown.) Less disruptive than questioning, the show takes bodies as places of celebrating, opening. It blends fear and nostalgia.

On view until Jan. 28, 2023. Screening of Barbara Hammer films Jan. 14, 3-5pm 

January 5, 2023