CatharineClarkGallery

With my body of work "Hotheads," I am interested in deciphering the language and sub-textual meaning of artworks that I have encountered throughout my career. In doing so, I want to better understand how I have been indelibly shaped through my own passive viewing of a lifetime’s worth of visual information – from classical works in the Western art historical cannon, to a myriad of commercial images, such as signage and news photos to film stills and advertisements. By extension, I want to celebrate women-identified artists, activists, and cultural producers who are often under-recognized or who have been written out of popular discourse. In reclaiming the term "hotheads," which is frequent used as a pejorative against socially active and activated women, I also wish to celebrate how hotheads dare to flout decorum and authority in their expressions of independent thought and action.

For this project, I wanted to create a broadside that advertises the imagined sale of Dianne Feinstein's San Francisco mansion, that takes place on the Ides of March. The home has been a site of protests in recent years. Recently, Feinstein was in the news distancing herself from her billionaire husband, who sold significant amounts of stock right before the Covid-19 crisis that began in mid-March. Feinstein's extreme wealth, gained in large part from property investments, raises questions about her ability to ethically govern in an area with a notorious housing crisis.

I'm interested in her as a complex character: she has one foot squarely rooted in conservative aesthetics of mainstream womanhood, and another deeply invested in accruing and maintaining her own power. Perhaps this contradictory combination, embodied in an iconic Democratic female political leader, re-enforces social and economic inequality rather than challenging it.

"Dependent” is a collaborative letterpress broadside by Julia Goodman and Michael Hall, their first project produced as a family. As Goodman writes: "we designed this print with the heft of the 2020 election on our minds. In addition to everything already at stake, this is our first year voting as parents. Looking ahead, we realized our son, Irving, will not be able to vote for president until 2040."

Goodman and Hall’s powerful composition hopes to remind viewers as to why we keep fighting for those who we love, those who are most vulnerable, and those whose future we hope will be better than ours.

"Together Forever" is a simple reflection of humanity. Especially in today's society, despite the political, ideological, geographical differences, humankind is working together to save lives and save the planet. We need to open our hearts and minds to each other and remember to focus on a better forever.

Masha Kechaeva's work explores new theatre forms and shapes of performance by соnnecting science and art. The study of rituals, symbols, unconscious memories and dreams is an important part of her artistic research, whether in working on a performance or personal project, Kechaeva's letterpress print is a continuation of her ongoing Road Sign Poetry Project, which was inspired by billboards that the artist encountered while travelling across the USA. By freeing slogans from the job of selling, the artist finds one voice there. The tone of this voice brings us to very human needs and wants, a snapshot of modern society. This alchemical process, as Kechaeva describes it, transforms the insistent rhythm of the roadside marketing into the poetry of yearning.

The letterpress print "DISARM" is based on a video titled “113..." (2019), an ambitious and immersive 7-channel video installation that documented and commemorated every high school mass shooting in the United States between the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 and the end of 2018. Employing aerial shots of football fields and surrounding neighborhoods of these schools, Oropallo and Rappaport evoke a different kind of American iconography — one that highlights, both visually and sonically, the contrast between the innocence and joy of youth and the horrors of gun violence.

The underlying map depicted in the letterpress print is the Columbine campus. The oval target shape is set over the oval football field. There have been 113 school shootings between April 20, 1999 and the end of 2018. That number of bullet holes dotted the page of the first print in the edition; with each subsequent edition, the artists removed the "shots," as a metaphor for both the repetition and the disarming of weapons.