WCA Panel at CAA: Artist & Family Collaborations
Morderator: Niku Kashef, California State University, Northridge
Panelists: Christen Clifford, The New School; Courtney Kessel, Ohio University Art Gallery; Rachel Lachowicz, Claremont Graduate University; Walter Meyer, Santa Monica College; Margaret Morgan, artist
This panel considers the work of artists whose creative practice engages themes of maternity to position themselves as agents of cultural change.
Christen Clifford
Writer, teacher, and performance artist
Notably RAPEY RAPE NITE: A celebration of #sexualjustice and an exorcism of the demons of trauma
Courtney Kessel
Making Up
This work is a series of photos which document a collaboration between me and my daughter. Given a 'tour' of my clothes, makeup, socks, shoes, etc., she was given the timeframe of one-hour to dress me and make me up. It was a cross between playing together, playing dolls, dressing a live model/doll, and spending time with each other. The outcomes were wildly unexpected and grossly more mature than I ever thought she would do given the opportunity to put absolutely ANYTHING on her mother.
Rachel Lachowicz
Lachowicz explores the relationship of identity and the politics of mark making, predominately through the use of cosmetics. Lachowicz makes both discreet objects and large-scale installations that are visually lush (at times sexually provocative) and always with a deliberate repurposing of meaning.
This piece is made of lipstick wax (!)
Margaret Morgan
Morgan thinks of herself as a scatologico-feminist, which is to say her oeuvre considers the discomforting subject of scatology from a feminist perspective, arguing that a performed and manifest misogyny is itself a mask for an even more pervasive bodily anxiety around the subjects of anailty, bodily waste, and decay.
Niku Kashef
The cosmology of "Monsters in the Closet" explores coexisting moments of fear and wonder through the eyes of a child. Large-scale photographs, stories and artist books are the remnants of installations built collaboratively with children in their bedrooms and playspaces. Crowdsourced childhood memories are the resource material for the fantastic fairytale scenes.
