Net, artist Mimi Biyao Bai’s site-responsive project, contemplates safety, survival, and visibility. Drawing a parallel between camouflage and assimilation, Bai considers both as labor-intensive adaptations for survival that selectively reveal and/or conceal.
Obscuring the traditional white box of the gallery in a wash of safety orange—a color often worn by hunters due to its high visibility to most humans and the difficulty of discernment it causes for prey animals—Bai asks visitors to question how one can be simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible. Effective camouflage requires the camoufleur to be aware of their environment, how they are being perceived in relation to it, and who is doing the perceiving.
Suspended across the space, an accumulation of individual knots forms a flexible mass that can expand and contract in response to the environment. Net can be viewed as a temporary shelter, a flayed ghillie suit, and a matrix of entanglements that can catch, hold, and capture. Hand-made using thousands of yards of nylon and cotton twine, the artist used her body weight to achieve the proper tension for each knot. Bai’s intense physical labor makes tangible the often invisible and immaterial effort necessary to “blend in” with one’s surroundings.
By abstracting fragments of her personal and familial history into patterns and forms, the artist has developed an iconography that she employs throughout her larger practice. A prominent example is the ghost, seen in This Kind of Memory Requires Motion on view in the gallery’s backroom. The character of the ghost emerged from a costume Bai wore as a child during her first Halloween in the US, then evolved through her research into ghillie suits—garments worn by snipers and hunters to conceal their bodies from an enemy or target. Through drawing and sculpture, Bai re-imagines and enacts alternative perspectives on survival, adaptation, interdependence, and creative possibility.
Also on view, on the exterior of Essex Market at the corner of Norfolk and Broome streets, is a re-presentation of I Pledge. Presented here as a vinyl installation, I Pledge was created by Amy Khoshbin, House of Trees, and Naomi Shihab Nye in response to mounting xenophobia and gender-based violence for the one-year anniversary of the 2017 Women’s March. I Pledge continues to advocate for a public covenant of respect for all. The collaborators offer a poetic pledge to fight for inclusive, empathetic, humane, and intersectional change.
The exhibition continues at The James Gallery in midtown Manhattan, centering the work of 17 female-identifying artists, who imagine ways for women to take up the space they are already producing. What might a city honoring women’s lived experiences look like? How can the city be a living archive of women’s accomplishments in a visual vocabulary that may not already be recognized in the dominant discourse? This work is often achieved through a preoccupation with hands-on and labor-intensive making practices that foreground physical and embodied attentiveness to materials, social gathering, and awareness of time.
-
Textures of Feminist Perseverance is conceived by artist Dina Weiss and curator Katherine Carl, Ph.D. (James Gallery Institute for Art, Inquiry & Collaborative Practice, CUNY Graduate Center) and presented in partnership with Jodi Waynberg, Executive Director of Artists Alliance Inc and Director of Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space.
