Women & Art, Modern Art, Art of the 1980s and 1990s, Peoples & Nationalities in Art

Girls' Night Out

Name: Girls' Night Out
Author: Elizabeth Armstrong
ISBN: 9780917493362

by Elizabeth Armstrong

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Overview

Imagine a girls' night out with Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Elina Brotherus, Dorit Cypis, Rineke Dijkstra, Katy Grannan, Sarah Jones, Kelly Nipper, Daniela Rossell, Shirana Shahbazi, and Salla Tykka. Imagine a very particular kind of girl talk, one that crisscrosses generations and nations, that openly and fluidly recognizes gender differences and sexual necessities, that delves deeply into psychology and lyricism. A conversation that's moved beyond challenging or critiquing feminist archetypes--but knows how it got to that point, thank you early feminism. The women artists represented in this catalogue create works that possess a quasi-documentary feel and a directness of approach, that engage such classical representational subjects as landscape, portraiture, and self-portraiture. They acknowledge their predecessors, the feminist photography, film, and performance artists of the 70s and 80s, but have moved on to confidently explore feminist identity, especially in the adolescent girl, and produce imagery that is compellingly, and resoundingly, uncertain and contradictory.

Synopsis

Edited by Karen Jacobson. Essays by Irene Hofmann, Taru Elfving and Bill Horrigan. Foreword by Dennis Szakacs. Introduction by Elizabeth Armstrong.

About the Author, Elizabeth Armstrong

Eija-Liisa Ahtila was born in 1959 in Hameenlinna, Finland. She started working with audio-visual media in the late 1980s, exploring experimental narrative storytelling techniques, including the connection between short films and commercials, and the possibilities of narration in splitscreens and multiscreen installations. Her films have been successfully screened in over 50 international film festivals and on television, while her installations of the films have been mounted at such venues as Documenta11 and at the Tate Modern in London.

Daniela Rossell was born in Mexico City in 1973. While studying figure drawing and paintings at the National School of Visual Arts in Mexico City, she worked independantly with an automatic camera. In 1997 Rossell was included in a group show at the Museo del Barrio in New York; the next year she had her first solo exhibition at Greene Naftali. Since then, her work has appeared at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Berkley Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and, most recently, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York.

Rineke Dijkstra was born in 1959 in Sittard, the Netherlands, and lives and works in Amsterdam. She has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Venice Biennale; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Photographers Gallery, London.

Katy Grannan was born in Arlington, Mass., in 1969, and earned her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991 and her M.F.A. from Yale University in photography in 1999. That same year, she was selected by Gregory Crewsdonto appear in a show called Another Girl, Another Planet, which thrust her and a number of young women photographers, including Jenny Gage, Anna Gaskel, Justine Kurland and Malerie Marder, into the spotlight. She has since had a number of solo shows in the U.S. and abroad, and her photographs have been acquired for the permanent collections of the International Center of Photography, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her work has also been featured in Artforum, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. She lives and works in New York City and San Francisco.

Bill Horrigan is Media Arts Curator at the Wexner Center for the Arts. He has curated projects by Chris Marker, Mark Dion, and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, among others.