Using photography, drawing, embroidery, and performance this exhibition centers and celebrates bodies that have traditionally been hidden or marginalized within mainstream media and pop culture. It aims to broaden our collective vision of who can be the protagonist in the stories we tell.

 

Can we learn to separate morality and worthiness from appearance?

 

About the Artists:

 

Ashley Ja’nae uses pen and ink to draw portraits that explore the humanity and experiences of Black American women. Her work focuses on visual texture, rhythm, contrast, space, and the idea of what one can create with limitations. Her collective work functions as a visual safe space while it explores self-acceptance, intersectionality, and the deconstruction of beauty standards.

 

Dafna Steinberg works with themes that relate to the experiences of women and the fragmentation of the female body. She also makes work about interactions between men and women and how these interactions play out in building relationships and understanding. Most of the time, her work is pretty funny. She has also made work in response to the current political and cultural climate regarding objectification of the female body, reproductive rights, sexual assault and continuous attacks on a woman's right to be autonomous. She explores how, as much as things change, they still stay very much the same.

 

Matt Storm.  From the artist “As a transgender person, there are not many places I can find nuanced and complex images of people like me.”

“There may never be a comprehensive way to look at a body “like mine”, unless it is a way to look at mine, specifically. And the same for all of us. This series of images of my body in the studio creates a new lexicon of ways to see a body, inclusive of ways to see mine. Sometimes, we can only see what we already know how to see. What ways of looking, enabled by a ten-second self-timer, a tripod, a digital camera, and blessedly rich natural light, see me?”

 

Hard Stitched is an alias for the artist. His series was created following years of therapy sessions as a way to cope with traumas and real-life experiences that come with the label as a "black, gay, male" in Post-Colonial America. Masculinity, social media meets pornography, the historical fetishization of ethnic bodies, and creating individual power through socially taboo forms of self-identity and expression. Using traditional techniques such as hand embroidery, illustration, and fabric dyeing, the artist uses his unique style to translate an often suppressed truth.

 Amy Loko is a creative economy catalyst based in Washington, DC. Over the past 10 years she has worked with over 200 visual artists  and coordinated exhibitions and arts programming in a variety of venues in the DMV including Anacostia Arts Center and Honfleur Gallery. She is passionate about finding ways to make art accessible to people who don’t think that art is for them and to support and empower artists who are underrepresented and/or under resourced.

 

Events:

 

September 15, 2018

 Opening reception 5-8pm

 

September 30, 2018

 Does This Make Me Look Fat?: Self-Portraiture, Selfies and the Bigger Female Body

 Lecture by Dafna Steinberg 3-5pm

 

October 5, 2018

 BODIES Artist Talk moderated by Amy Loko 7-9pm

 

October 13, 2018

 Poetic Vibes: The Body Edition 8-10pm

 Open Mic series curated and hosted by Harvey Fitz