Opening reception: Saturday July 9, 3 to 5pm
Closing reception: Saturday July 30, 3 to 5pm
In Bean Gilsdorf’s new series Some Women, the artist expands her sculptural practice into an unconventional photographic space. Over the past twelve years, Gilsdorf has worked extensively with images of iconic cultural and political figures appropriated from mass-market history books, printing these images onto textiles and sewing them into allegorical soft sculptures. Her slumping, deflated constructions—slipcovers of first ladies and busts of former presidents—embody the worn-out myths that America uses to prop up its narratives of exceptionalism. For Some Women, Gilsdorf used images of women convicted of violent crimes to construct a suite of sewn sculptures, then arranged the figures and photographed them as portraits. Through the transmutation of source image to sculpture to photograph, Gilsdorf produces an ambiguous space that complicates the relationship between object and image—an approach that mimics the process by which history creates archetypes from individuals. Dramatically lit and arranged into conspicuously strange poses, the figures function as avatars of society’s fascinated repulsion for women who have violated cultural norms and betrayed the so-called nature of their gender.
This project was supported by a 2021 Make Grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Nine Gallery is located inside Blue Sky Gallery/The Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts. Please note that Blue Sky requires proof of vaccination, and masks are recommended.
Bean Gilsdorf's practice examines the iconography of political histories and cultural narratives, mainly through the evocative medium of cloth. Her projects have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and the American Textile History Museum, as well as exhibition spaces in Poland, England, Italy, China, and South Africa. Gilsdorf’s work is in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, Kala Art Institute, and the International Quilt Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2011, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
Visitor information: Open Wednesday through Saturday, 12 to 5pm
Type: Exhibition
Cost: Free
Diversity: Women/Femme
Bean Gilsdorf. Mercy is Greater, 2022; archival pigment print; 35 × 23.3 inches, unframed. Ed. 3 + 1AP
ALT Text: A photograph of a textile sculpture of a woman in a yellow blouse with a large collar. She is posed awkwardly and lit so that there is a cartoonish shadow behind her.