Good Smoke/Good Poke
0-0 LA June 8 – July 21, 2018
Opening reception: Friday, June 8, 6:00 – 9:00 pm
Gallery hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12:00 – 4:00 pm
Binder of Women is excited to announce Good Smoke/Good Poke, its first collective show, at 0-0 LA. Good Smoke and Good Poke reflect Binder of Women’s intent to highlight a growing number of important artists. These side-by-side shows allow Binder of Women to present multiple iterations of work and reveal the power in fluidity.
Good Smoke features work from Hayley Barker, Michelle Blade, Claire Colette, Jamie Felton, Kysa Johnson, Lindsey Lyons, Bruna Massadas, Maysha Mohamedi, Erin Morrison, Laurie Nye, and Hilary Pecis that represent each artist’s primary concepts, materials, and processes. While the works vary from representational to abstract and gestural forms, they reveal connections through their proximity.
Smoke can obscure, connect, heal, harm, and transform. It is a tool that serves to be ritualistic or invasive. The result of fire, smoke’s power lies in its amorphous and shifting nature, a signal when seen from afar or a blinder when taken in too quickly or closely. Good Smoke is all of these properties, and its eleven artists weave their work together in a certain sort of cloud this summer.
Good Poke is the id to the ego of Good Smoke. Unified by Hayley Barker, Michelle Blade, Claire Colette, Yasmine Diaz, Jamie Felton, Shaun Johnson, Kysa Johnson, Natasha Khan, Lindsey Lyons, Bruna Massadas, Sarana Mehra, Maysha Mohamedi, Erin Morrison, Laurie Nye, Hilary Pecis, Anna Schachte, Kira Shewfelt, Maureen St. Vincent, and Erin Trefry’s connections to erotica, Good Poke is hung across the wall in part of the gallery and also crosses into the private boundary of the WC. Michelle Blade has created a curtain honoring the erotic that marks the beginning of this visual exploration of the body politic through the artists’ fantasies and pains in relation to the feminine, the anti-feminine, sexuality, and the body— both literally and figuratively. This peep show is a sex-positive response to the curtained and shuttered-off places the artists could not usually enter as little girls. Thank you to 0-0 LA and the artists. Binder of Women Binder of Women (BOW) is an artist-run project by Hayley Barker, Michelle Blade, Claire Colette, Jamie Felton, Kysa Johnson, Lindsey Lyons, Bruna Massadas, Maysha Mohamedi, Erin Morrison, Laurie Nye, and Hilary Pecis.
Conceptualized in Los Angeles in 2017 by painter Hilary Pecis, BOW is an independent platform for contemporary artists to share their work. This is a unified move to empower female artists, expand their reach, broach the topic of equality and consent in the art world, and take action to grow the number of works by female identifying artists in contemporary art collections. BOW’s inaugural project was a collective folio of limited edition works on paper by each of the ten establishing artists.
A folio release party was held at The Pit, Glendale, CA, in December 2017, and a limited number of folios are still available at thebinderofwomen.com.