November 2014
La Petite Mort Gallery presents
SUPERPOWER
Group Exhibit curated by Missy Marston-Shmelzer.
November 7 – 30, 2014 / Vernissage November 7, 2014 / 7 – 10pm
ARTISTS: Alexis Boyle, Karina Bergmans, Olivia Johnston, Natalie Bruvels, Helen Sadler, Andrea Sutton & Missy Marston-Shmelzer.
NEW: On opening night, storytellers, Marisa Gallemit and Lesley Demon will explain how they found their power, and Missy Marston will read from her novel, The Love Monster.
Statement:
When LPM owner Guy Berube invited me to curate a group show this fall I was in a particular kind of mood. For the first time since my twenties I was feeling some righteous feminist anger.
After a couple of decades of feeling like the world was getting better and better, it suddenly felt possible that things could get worse. Schoolgirls were being abducted in Nigeria, access to safe birth control and abortion were being threatened in several states in the US; every day I seemed to read about online trolls threatening to rape and kill women who expressed opinions. It seemed like instead of a steady march forward for women’s rights — a wave I had been happily riding for my entire life — things could actually start going backwards all around the world. The idea that you could lose things you had already won – the right to education, safe health care, freedom of expression – was eating away at me.
So, being in that kind of mood, I decided the show would be about women.
SUPERPOWER features the work of the best lady-artists I can think of in every medium: painters Alexis Boyle, Natalie Bruvels and Helen Sadler; draftswoman Andrea Sutton; photographer Olivia Johnston; textile artist Karina Bergmans. I asked them to create work that celebrated the superpowers of everyday women.
I wanted to invite women artists to create work about women, but I didn’t want a show about darkness. I didn’t want to give the dark side any more air time. I wanted a show about joy and power. And that might even give us a much needed laugh.
Written by Missy Marston-Shmelzer, 2014