Care / Condition / Control
Curated by A.E. Chapman
601Artspace, 88 Eldridge St, NYC
Feb 22 - April 27, 2025
View installation images
Impulse Magazine review
OPENING WEEKEND
Friday, Feb 21, from 6-8pm - Opening Reception with a performance by Armando Guadalupe Cortés.
Saturday Feb 22 at 2pm - O' Canada, a talk with Vancouver-based artists Rebecca Bair and Germaine Koh and curator A.E. Chapman.
Rebecca Bair
John Coplans
Armando Guadalupe Cortés
Cristina de Gennaro
Magdalena Dukiewicz
Oasa DuVerney
Jarrett Key
Germaine Koh
Greer Lankton
Meryl Meisler
Sara Messinger
Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman
Calli Roche
Joseph Rodriguez
Cindy Sherman
Melissa Stern
Trish Tillman
Curator’s Statement:
Humans are obsessed with hair. And hair is never just hair. Intensely personal, it is quite literally how people frame themselves to signal their desired appearance to others. Individuals use hair as an expressive language to convey both their individuality and collective affiliations, and societies in turn regulate hair as a means to enforce and maintain social control, allegiance, and order. Be it conforming or rebellious, hair reflects and negotiates the social contracts between individuals and gender, racial, subcultural, and religious identities. Hair can elicit polarizing responses–from envy to repulsion–acting as a nimble proxy for culture, time, place, age, identity, growth, and vitality.
As Paul C. Taylor states in Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, “The aesthetic implicates and is implicated by the political.” In other words, the aesthetic becomes an arena where political struggles and controversies are actively played out. In the contemporary United States, hegemony is enforced through discriminatory grooming policies, proposed state laws and executive orders targeting gender expression and identity, and compulsory military and prison buzz cuts. Often, those attempting to suppress personal autonomy regarding appearance cite cleanliness as their logic. In her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva observes that “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.” Given the historically compounded nature of repressions, hair can carry painful intergenerational trauma. Yet, collective resistance to these systems of oppression sparks kinship, joy, and homage. Through hair, people build spaces of community, intimacy, and specificity.