Mar 24, 20203 min read

The Binder of Women at Track 16

Janna Ireland, Estate, If Everything is an Outrage: The Binder of Women, Track 16 Gallery; Image courtesy of the gallery

Collective Binder of Women Shows Deep Breadth at Track 16

Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles extended through April 18th

Written by Genie Davis Closing April 18th, If Everything is an Outrage: The Binder of Women now at Track 16 Gallery, refers to both the name of a potent collective, and political and patriarchal diminishment.

Varied and rich, the Binder of Women refers to the name of a collective inspired to launch in 2017 and name their group of artists offer a 2012 debate comment by then-candidate Mitt Romney. It refers to both his comment and a meme that arose from it, in which Romney said he relied on “binders full of women” given to him by women’s groups as his way to handle pay disparity between the sexes.

Eleven artists from the collective present work in this terrific exhibition, which is filled with a wide range of mediums, styles, and subjects. By creating their own “binder” they are handling a different disparity – in artistic representation. Each work is strong. Exhibiting artists include Michelle Blade, Yasmine Diaz, Rema Ghuloum, Janna Ireland, Kysa Johnson, Galia Linn, Bruna Massadas, Sarana Mehra, Erin Morrison, Julia Schwartz, and Ginger Wolfe-Suarez.

Rema Ghulou’s oil, acrylic, and gouache work “Seer” is one of three softly evocative abstracts she exhibits here. Dream-like, each in a different color palette, the images have contained within them figurative shapes – in “Red Sun,” viewers discern a human shape; in “Long Walk,” what could be a leaf. And in “Seer,” there appear to be orbs as well as a human shape, something almost visibly mystical.

Erin Morrison’s oil and ink on gypsum cement works are as deeply textural as they are galvanizing. Red hands part a veil in “Red Veil,” while the mauve, shadowed image on “Odalisque” seem deeply carved in gouache and flashe. With the latter piece, the image appears both as a precisely rendered pattern and as a sensual experience for viewers.

Sarana Mehra’s “Glacier,” “Flash,” and “Starbucks Man” are created from resin and sand, recognizable shapes that have imbedded in their surface patterns that resemble modern hieroglyphics, patterns that include smiley faces, stars, and squares. In “Starbucks Man” they are judiciously placed, so that several resemble eyes, nose, mouth. Both whimsical and mysterious, these wall sculptures are intensely tactile.

Julia Schwartz offers three works in a lush lavender and green palette. Oil on canvas, and oil with marker, the works recall sea and forest, and are fecund and haunting. Her “Second Light” has an almost celestial look, the green near-chartreuse, with figurative images of tree and a being as part of the otherwise abstract work. “Fingers and Toes and Birds and Plants” gives the viewer exactly that, in an unusual juxtaposition that fits together like pieces in a cosmic puzzle.

“Blow up 413 – CRUDE (life)- phytoplankton after Monet” is one of two lovely images of natural beauty by artist Kysa Johnson. Delicate in palette, the watercolor, ink, and graphite on panel work seems almost to float. Her black-based sky image, “Blow up 414 – the long goodbye – Crude (Birth) – subatomoic decay patterns and the creation of hydrocarbons in the Cone Nebula,” is a lovely and surreal swirl of sky, planets, stars, deconstructing.

Ginger Wolfe-Suarez’s “Breath of Work” utilizes raw materials collected from beaches and oceans, extracting the dye onto silk panels. The delicate brown and white palette is ghostly and appears, at a distance, to waver.

Janna Ireland’s vividly colorful C-Print work of citrus, flowers, and children is visually as juicy as the fruit; while Galia Linn’s painted broken kiln shelves and glazed stoneware, from her “Untitled” Intentions Series, is as compelling as her other sculptural stoneware works in this show, each surreal and involving.

All of the artists’ work is well worth exploring – this is one “binder” that must be kept open.

Exhibition runs from February 8 to March 21, 2020.