Banshees
Participating artists: Kat Chamberlin, Roxanne Jackson, Rose Nestler, Heidi Norton, Esther Ruiz, Carolyn Salas, Trish Tillman, Letha Wilson
January 11 - February 22, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 11, 6 - 8PM
Asya Geisberg Gallery is pleased to present "Banshees," a group exhibition of eight women sculptors whose work uses traditionally femme signifiers to subvert gendered narratives and traditions through a manipulation of scale, material, and surface. The banshee is a female spirit in Irish folklore who heralds the death of a family member, usually by screaming, wailing, or shrieking. The cry of the spirit is mournful beyond all other sounds on earth, in the silence of the night. Here, the Banshee is re-embodied as contemporary cries of protest and refusal, and the notion of “good girl” / “bad girl.” With concrete, neon, steel, ceramic, wood, and leather - distinctive material choices and juxtapositions - a disregard for rules of the game unfolds. The Banshees negotiate tensions through dream theory, mythology, and history. The works’ physical presence and symbolic power both reveal and distort perception.
In "Banshees," Trish Tillman begins with a silhouette of unconventional hairstyles as a rejection of societal norms, specifically inspired by the all-female fictional band the Misfits from the 80's animated series, an almost literal screaming like a banshee. Roxanne Jackson’s ceramics riff off both mythology and lore, colliding nature and fantasy, utility and absurdity, resulting in pieces that are equally playful, ironic, and grotesque. Carolyn Salas’ multidimensional chromatic sculptures consist of water-jet cut powdered steel and aluminum that refer to ritual, female strength, and stoic resilience. Her use of the silhouette transforms viewers’ perceptions of space and their relationship to objects. Rose Nestler’s portrayal of powerful female mythical figures or saints, most often depicted as protagonists of fairytales, is at odds with the reality of the patriarchy. Her anthropomorphic houses, furniture, bags - objects that hold things - relate to a human body as a container. Kat Chamberlin’s objects pushes boundaries, demanding the viewer to be aware of how often our body desires what a reasonable mind might resist.
Heidi Norton’s sculptures expand and compress, as they contain plants and other fossilized objects that move through ecological spans of time. The objects feel plucked out from a steampunk Victorian laboratory, where we find micro-worlds held between layered glass, beeswax, and detritus from around the studio. Letha Wilson’s wall pieces consist of molded chunks of concrete that intersect with creases and folds in the surface of photographic paper containing landscape fragments. Whether these mixed surface materials are held within an aluminum frame or pour around the edges, this depiction of nature with amorphous construction material warps our sense of architectural time and space. Esther Ruiz’s use of industrial materials, such as concrete, tinted mirrors, illuminated neon tubes, and commodity plastics, similarly considers the relationships between the natural and the artificial, as well as the familiar and the alien. Her precise, yet complex structures double as containers that examine the dichotomy between the earthly and the boundless, or function as portals that might transport us into a not-too-far future, where rebel women rule the world.