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The Monterey Museum of Art, as part of its Year of the Woman 2018 at MMA, has announced the opening July 20 of an exhibition of eight women artists’ works curated by Gail Enns and the nonprofit Celadon Arts, “The New Domestics - Finding Beauty in the Mundane.”



Part One, which opens July 20, features installations using doilies, lace, glass, household tools, resistors and capacitors and gives us a taste of more to come. Closing October 28, 2018.



Part Two, which opens Sept. 13, includes an installation using 1,000 French knots made of dyed red rope, another deconstructs kimonos into reverent altar pieces. Both parts of the exhibition run through Oct. 28, 2018. Year of the Woman 2018 is a series of events at MMA focusing on notable women artists of California and the Central Coast. Closing October 28, 2018.



“We are thrilled to have this pivotal exhibition at the museum. It’s exciting to see work that challenges the norm,” said Stuart A. Chase, director of the Monterey Museum of Art. “It really is the first exhibit of this kind here at the museum, and it establishes the museum as one that supports new ideas and the California arts community.”



“The New Domestics” features eight artists, Mitra Fabian, Susan Abbott Martin, Victoria May, Maria Porges, Judy Shintani, Lisa Solomon, Katherine Sherwood and The Temple Sisters, who use media found in domestic situations.



“The artists focus on how stereotypically domestic processes and the use of commonplace household materials can generate art that grapples with larger social and environmental concerns,” said Gail Enns, director of Celadon Arts, who curated the two-part exhibit. “Applying a distinct female perspective, these are powerful statements about the environment, political issues and universal truths within each work.”



The exhibition is composed of more than 80 works of art, including paintings, installations, mixed media work and sculpture, and includes the use of sewing, weaving, knitting, collage and ceramics combined with paint, embroidery floss, lace, thread and other elements that validate and connect these contemporary artists to work done by women artists of the past. Workshops, lectures and special tours of the exhibition with the curator will also be conducted as part of the exhibition.



“They are being creative, but they are doing more than that. They are practicing ‘Creative Disobedience’” wrote Patrick Frank, author of “Artforms: An Introduction to the Visual Arts,” a university textbook now in its 12th edition, in the exhibition catalog. “Their brand of creativity is not submissive or well-mannered or highly tasteful; it has an edge to it. It's insubordinate. It's also very stimulating and appropriate for these times”.



EXHIBITION:

“The New Domestics - Finding Beauty In The Mundane”

Dates: Part One – Coburn and Entry Galleries – July 20-Oct. 28, 2018

Part Two – Work Gallery – Sept. 13-Oct. 28, 2018

Opening Reception: Sept. 20, 2018, 5:30-7 p.m.



Monterey Museum of Art

559 Pacific Street, Monterey, CA

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Mitra Fabian incorporates resistors and capacitors, normally found on circuit boards, in sculptural and flat works. Their electrical function becomes obsolete as she focuses on their aesthetic potential.



Susan Abbott Martin uses materials found in domestic craft as well as tools, wax, wood, etc, These stimulate ideas which reside in memory and experience such as a smell, a sight, an idea, a touch to make the work to navigate towards an understanding of the outside. She finds that repetition can often reveal, through the smallest detail, what is essential.



Victoria May. An interest in tension and dichotomy fuels her artwork as she attempts to merge the delicate with the strong, to seduce and repel, to obscure and reveal and to combine the hand and the machine. A conceptual tension arises between beauty and darkness, alluding to the fundamental struggles inherent in the human condition. Using the framework of cultural constructs, such as abstraction, codification, circumscription, her work highlights the absurdity they often impose. By pitting the organic or visceral against the institutional, she seeks to reveal a dark humor or tender fragility in the seeming contortions that often underpin our lives.



Maria Porges transforms discarded books, combining them with hardware and text, giving them a new life as art objects. This process functions both as reclamation of their value and as recognition of the decreasing role of books in a digital media world.



Katherine Sherwood investigates the point at which the essential aspects of art, medicine, and disability intersect. Her works juxtapose abstracted medical images, such as cerebral angiograms of the artist’s brain, with fluid renderings of ancient patterns. She incorporates cloth, lace, thread and other materials to explore and reveal the strange nature of our time and current visual culture.



Judy Shintani appropriates cultural objects and transforms them to reflect the loosening connection to her ancestry and culture and the dissection of stereotypes. Instead of adorning the body, serving the deconstructed garments become symptoms of a broader social discomfort and represent not only the personal space but also the liminal space where the transformation of tradition, culture, and structure takes place.



Lisa Solomon creates domestic, gender-related work highlighting concepts of temporality, transition, memory and perception. Her work questions and deconstructs the very nature of identity through the exploration of mediums traditionally associated with “women’s work” and the archetypes of domesticity, the positioning of women and labor in society and the relevance of classical art mediums in contemporary art.



The Temple Sisters’ mixed media work looks at the hidden psychological injuries that women routinely endure. Their work draws from household materials such as house paints, paper, vintage tape, string and sewing patterns. Collaboration, both in applied method as well as conceptually, is at the core of their work. They each find the implicit trust required by working in tandem is an integral part of their art. A shared history and shared aesthetic emerges as a partnership in paint and paper.