KALI SPITZER, AN EXPLORATION OF RESILIENCE
An Exploration of Resilience is about identity, culture, strength, vulnerability, and love - these images are about resilience. This work investigates different facets of people and how they explore themselves…
SARA KATHRYN ARLEDGE, WHAT IS A MAN?, 1958
What Is a Man?, whose bemused shrug at that big question manages to encompass onscreen text, preexisting art, time-lapse and science photography, dance, documentary scenes, advertising satire, rhyme, song, even a game of musical chairs…
SUSAN WORSHAM, BY THE GRACE OF GOD
Growing up in Virginia, my childhood field trips were to cigarette factories and civil war battlegrounds, with a brown bag lunch in tow. As a young girl I could often be found holding a dixie cup full of Kool-Aid powder, with a few drops of water, making a sweet sugary paste for finger dipping…
ANS WESTRA, SELECTED WORKS
Born in 1936 in Leiden, Netherlands, Ans first arrived in Aotearoa in 1957 at the age of twenty-one. From the 1960s onwards, she spent long periods of time travelling around the country as a full-time freelance documentary photographer, working mainly for the Department of Education and Te Ao Hou…
SHIGEKO KUBOTA, DUCHAMPIANA: NUDE DESCENDING A STAIRCASE, 1976
Inspired by Duchamp's study of motion in his painting, Nude descending a staircase (1912), Kubota uses video to explore movement and temporality. In this single-channel combination of color video, color-synthesized video, and color Super-8 film transferred to video…
LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON, SEDUCTION OF A CYBORG, 1994
Lynn Hershman Leeson has been exploring the impact and potential of nascent technologies in relation to gender, sexuality, and disembodiment for more than 50 years. Her video Seduction of a Cyborg from 1994 presents technology as an infectious disease women are seduced into: The protagonist, a blind woman, agrees to physical treatment that allows her to see images via computer-screen transmission…
QUALEASHA WOOD, SELECTED WORKS
Qualeasha Wood is an interdisciplinary artist whose work contemplates realities around black female ontology that do and might exist. Inspired by a familial relationship to textiles, queer craft, Microsoft Paint and internet avatars Wood's tufted and tapestry pieces mesh traditional craft and contemporary technological materials…
SUZANNE WRIGHT, SELECT COLLAGES
For Joseph Campbell each person’s life can be seen as a mythical journey into the unknown, to discover the true self. It is about leaving behind the familiar, the comfortable and the safe to embark on a process involving danger, confusion and loss…
MADONNA, SEX, 1992
Sex is a 1992 coffee table book written by American singer Madonna, with photography by Steven Meisel Studio and Fabien Baron. It was edited by Glenn O'Brien and published by Warner Books, Maverick and Callaway…
ZOE LEONARD, I WANT A PRESIDENT, 1992
Zoe Leonard’s oft-cited work, ‘I want a president’ was written by the artist in 1992 in response to poet Eileen Myles’s presidential bid alongside George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot…
LIS RHODES, LIGHT READING, 1978
Lis Rhodes is a filmmaker and founding member of the women’s film and video distribution company Circles, established in 1979. Many of her films employ a primarily abstract language. Rhodes’s film, Light Reading, begins in darkness. A woman’s voice reads extracts of text by the American Modernist writer Gertrude Stein…
WANGECHI MUTU, HISTOLOGY OF THE DIFFERENT CLASSES OF UTERINE TUMORS, 2006
This set of twelve mixed-media works was made early in Mutu’s career, at a point when her practice was focused on collage. Drawing from disparate sources including medical journals, fashion magazines, pornography, and ethnographic texts, Mutu’s way of critiquing these publications is to cut them up and reassemble them for her own means…
JUDY CHICAGO, SELECTED EARLY FEMINIST WORK, 1970-74
In the early 1970’s, Judy Chicago concentrated on fusing her abstract iconography with a new-found determination to openly express her experiences as a woman, something that had been impossible when she was in college...
SHARON HAYES, WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITE, THEY SAID, 2014
I was intrigued by the question of how one shouts in text. I was engaged by the ambition and impossibility of the demand that is being made. And I was moved by the complexities that trans politics brings to the political identification with a term like “women”…
CINDY SHERMAN, SEX PICTURES, 1992
In 1992, Sherman produced a series of sex pictures using artificial body parts purchased from medical supply catalogues and typically employed for educational purposes. In this work, recalling the debased anatomical survey of a pornographic shot, detailed prostheses form a surrogate body…
SUE DE BEER, DISAPPEAR HERE, 2004
The first intercut image in the short video Disappear Here presents a sheet cake, as from a child's birthday party, showing the sentence "The recollection is a cascade of spatial metaphors" in frosting…
NANDITA RAMAN, WHEN MOUNTAINS RISE AND FALL LIKE WAVES
Louise Bourgeois talks of the unconscious and attempts to draw a petal on a grid. The grid and the unconscious are so far apart that a spacious ground emerges between them. This body of work finds the opposites only to discover that the distance between them is contingent on where one stands...
NJAIMEH NJIE, DID YOU GET EVERYTHING?
What do we take, and what is left behind when we leave home? With audio and visual collage, this installation takes visitors inside the collective memory of a fictional family that is leaving their home...
LAURIE ANDERSON, HABEAS CORPUS, 2015
Iconic performance artist Laurie Anderson expands upon her work fusing storytelling and technology, creating an installation and performance piece that examines lost identity, memory, and the resiliency of the human body and spirit...
MICKALENE THOMAS, OH MICKEY, 2008
My video and painting installation Oh Mickey! (2008), was inspired by a Balthus painting called La Toilette. In the Balthus, a young girl is wearing lube socks and red slippers, standing alone in an intimate interior space. In my piece, I have a model standing in one of my installations completely nude, except for tube socks and red heels, singing Toni Basil's “Mickey” song...