current exhibitions | upcoming exhibitions | past exhibitions

Vocabulary

Annual Artist Group Exhibition featuring Darla Bjork, Elizabeth Bisbing, Eve Ingalls, Susan Hockaday, Lucy Hodgson, Nancy Rodrigo, Kathy Stark, Gayle Tanaka, and Eleonora Tammes.

Opening Friday, January 4, 2019 6-9PM
On view January 4 – February 1, 2019

Installation images available here.

Image: Nancy Rodrigo, Red, white, and Blue, 2018

SOHO20 presents its 2019 annual group exhibition Vocabulary, featuring drawings, paintings, photographs, and mixed-media works by members Darla Bjork, Elizabeth Bisbing, Eve Ingalls, Susan Hockaday, Lucy Hodgson, Nancy Rodrigo, Kathy Stark, Gayle Tanaka, and Eleonora Tammes.

In her indescribably present poem from 1996, “Responding,” Juliana Spahr proffers:

“the question here is the same as that of a relationship

where does art define our vocabulary?

the margin declares

[it is impossible to speak about something

it is only possible to speak beside it…”

What is it to concern oneself with a ‘something?’

For over forty-five years as one of the oldest women’s collectives, SOHO20 has concerned itself with the something of feminism.  By what and whose definition(s) do we speak / have we spoken / will we speak about / beside / by means or spite of, such?

While explicitly these are not the questions that the nine artists in Vocabulary ask, their works, notably exhibited within the context of a historic feminist space, are an offering of many somethings.

To share this space encourages conversations amongst the works.  Select, for instance, a hyperbolic hand waving eerily (of Lucy Hodgson’s drawings); let it speak to Nancy Rodrigo’s ghostly skeleton losing its shadow inside a figure, a seeming reversal of Carolee Schneeman’s famed performance.  From the collaged fabric that forms petals of an domestic hydrangea (Elizabeth Bisbing) wander to photographed petals intermingling with recycled materials and detritus (Susan Hockaday).  Individually the works speak; together they illicit Vocabulary.

In conjunction with this exhibition is Studio, an installation of images from the past four decades of the SOHO20 members and community, demarcating the divers definitions of this term.

Image: “In the studio, Amsterdam, 1982,” Eleonora Tammes.