B.C. Binning and Alvin Balkind Galleries presents curated works by Steven Brekelmans, Justine A. Chambers, Brady Cranfield, Maura Doyle, Claire Greenshaw, Leisure (Meredith Carruthers & Susannah Wesley), Annie MacDonell, Erica Stocking and Damla Tamer.
The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom begins from the premise that the patriarchal conditions we inherited from modernism have profoundly shaped assumptions about where and by what means “serious” artwork gets produced. This exhibition shares the perspectives of ten artists whose practices are attentive to these assumptions, and to the very real temporal, spatial and monetary constraints that bind and shape their work. Their contributions to the show address a multitude of labours—whether physical, emotional, reproductive or otherwise—that are often inextricable from artistic production. Some question myths of the studio and the “magical” labour of the artist. Others explore unconventional models of authorship, including the entanglement of childcare and creative work. Each, in different ways, asks how we navigate (or resist) our artistic and political inheritances, and how we might seek out alternate role models and alliances through which to better strengthen our creative communities.
The exhibition takes its name from the title of Erica Stocking’s sculptural installation and theatrical performance, which offers an anchor point in the show. The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom: a choreographed statement on autobiographical art making (2019) extends to visitors a participatory framework through which to explore the porosity of subjecthood from the perspective of a woman practicing art alongside motherhood. Stocking’s artistic practice is emphatically enmeshed in her domestic life. Her subject matter, materials and collaborative process all draw from that which is close at hand. Within the installation, visitors can don dazzle-patterned costumes and self-organize to rehearse the script. Collapsing time, space and psyche, the play offers an allegory through which Stocking weaves meditations on her own experience together with references to historic women artists whose undervalued, boundary-defying practices figured prominently in her own artistic development.
Collectively The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom asserts the generative potential of these other spaces and cadences of creation, addresses artists’ feelings of constraints and distraction, and calls for acknowledgement of and solidarity in different ways of being—and making art—in the world.
Curated by Kimberly Phillips
Assisted by Julia Lamare