Photo Book exhibition

 

Prints from photobook The Girls We Are 

Leah Evans

The Girls We Are focuses on the transitional space between girlhood and womanhood by exploring the intersection between traditionally contrasting themes such as innocence and sexuality. The work consists of both my own photography as well as film pulled from family archives. This use of old film scans in the book adds a vintage feel to the work, while allowing me to employ photographs of myself, my sisters, and my mother in our youth. My photobook also looks at themes such as aging, sisterhood, and guilt through the use of photographs, poetry, text, photograms, and finally, the colour pink. Said Poetry and excerpts written by my sister Jordyn Evans compliment a number of the photographs, most prominently and appropriately with her poem “My Sister is Old at 21”. The Girls We Are employs a feminist critique on the sexualization of young girls and the expected embracement of sexuality by contrasting these issues.  

Overall, the book employs a “coquette” hyper-feminine aesthetic in its execution and imagery, while addressing that the girl and the women coexist in many of us.

from left to right:

Heels, found film from family archives, inkjet print

Mirrored Fujica and Nets, 35mm film, inkjet print

Mom on Beach, found film from family archives, inkjet print

Feminist Avantegarde: Art of the 1970s

Exhibition (past): https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/feminist-avant-garde

-this exhibition consisted of 48 artists (including names such as Martha Rosler and Francesca Woodman) and over 150 works from the Verbund collection, which is responsible for this international touring of said body of work. Lesser-known artists included in the show include the poet, actress, and performance artists Katalin Ladik and the Austrian artist Birgitta Jürgenssen. 

This “exhibition highlights groundbreaking practices that shaped the feminist art movement and provides a timely reminder of the wide impact of a generation of artists.” The art exhibited as part of Feminist Avante-garde of the 1970s: Works from the Verbund collection consisted of photographs, performances, video art, and collage, and “reflects a moment during which practices of emancipation, gender equality, and civil rights protest movements became part of public discourse. [The exhibition] operates across public and personal realms - as well as used [the artists body] as central motifs - [through which] these artists sought to address broad political issues and confront patriarchy and sexism in art. In doing so they created new, positively assertive female identities.”

The publication:https://www.amazon.ca/Feminist-Avant-Garde-Sammlung-Verbund-Collection/dp/3791354469

-The art present in this book is “provocative, radical, poetic, ironic, angry, cynical, and heartfelt.”

Francesca Woodman, Several Cloudy Days, Rome, Italy. Silver gelatin print, 1977.

Martha Rosler, Cleaning the Drapes from the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful. Photomontage, c. 1967-72.