Blackbird Rook
TO BE SEEN
19.01.23 - 23.02.23
Exhibiting Artists: Sarah Baker, Marilyn Hallam, Alison Jones, Irini Karayannopoulou, Andi Magenheimer, Hannah Murgatroyd, India Nielsen, Rebecca Parkin, Kate Street, Zoe Francis Spowage and Milly Thompson
An archetype is a communally recognized form that dwells within our universal consciousness - a recurrent symbol in our popular culture arising from a shared mental landscape. Jung argued that they are informed and created by our common need to organize and define ourselves as human beings.
Their continued relevance would suggest that ancient patterns are repeated eternally, century after century. Although each generation has the illusion that they are transformed into something other, something more thoughtful or progressive, away from the animal and closer to the machine, perhaps the old things that define us are unavoidable. It's both terrifying and comforting.
But femininity is layered and complex, and female archetypes seem to reverse this complexity and limit a woman's personality into one, basic role - mother, lover, fighter. But how can a woman become a Mother without becoming a Lover first, and wouldn't a Mother become a Fighter if her child was in danger? How many roles and blueprints do we exercise throughout our lives and how can we escape the externalisation of this labeling that can limit us to repeated patterns that take us no where but in vicious circles? Can women (and men) escape these predestined routes and indulge in the complexity of being? The artists here make work that explore contemporary revisions on familiar feminine paradigms.
There are works which underline the everlasting motif of subjectified women while reflecting on contemporary society’s expectation of perfection and the ideal. There are images of women of a particular social class who are also part of a system of representation in magazine images and high life blogs. In the clothes and shoes these women wear, they exemplify sexist assumptions that are found in different ways across the entire social structure. They remind us that sexualised images are still at the apex of a wider structure of exchanges and that the immediate circle of people around know this, and don't appear to care. There is a familiar commodification of the female body, but explored through a combination of images and objects that refocus the issue.
Daryl Hannah’s iconic performance as a mermaid in the 1984 romantic comedy ‘Splash’ provides pop cultural inspiration for a series in which the hybrid and mesmeric ‘merwoman’ is centralized as the principal figure and agent of nature. The frothy femme fatale emerges from the foaming waves and eyes us knowingly. Here there are also women questing, enduring and, expanding into the voyage of motherhood; women who aren’t on show for any man’s benefit; women without men, revelling in their own curves and sensual potential. Cowgirls and performers shakily seize back control and middle-aged women, ageing well, are not invisible, but behaving badly - or at least are demanding to be seen.
Text written in collaboration.
In memory of Milly Thompson - a much loved artist, teacher and friend.
JANUS II
New work from the 2nd edition of the femzine by Irini Karayannopoulou
JANUS II - Irini Karayannopoulou
28.01.23 - 25.02.23
In the 1970’s there were two Janus magazines. The first and longest running was edited in London and contained S&M erotica. The other was a feminist, science fiction fanzine edited in Madison, Wisconsin. The artist Irini Karayannopoulou was inspired by both editions to create her own Janus femzine. Curated with text by Christina Petkopoulou, and with the support of the Greek Ministry of Culture and the Niarchos Foundation, Saturday 28th January 2023 saw the launch at HYPER HYPO in Athens of the second edition of Janus. Alongside the launch Blackbird Rook released 12 of the original artworks from the publication.
Irini Karayannopoulou’s artistic practice involves a wide range of media, employed to serve her research on visual culture, female representation and painting as a semiological experiment. Working on the imagery she carefully selects from her collection of magazines, newspapers, zines and printed advertisements, she creates prints and collages to intervene with poignant drawing. By isolating the depictions of the female body as captured by popular culture, she assigns new roles to the protagonists in order to create new, autonomous female forms of existence.
The painting series JANUS II consists of the original artworks for Karayannopoulou’s limited edition zine. In JANUS editions, the two 70s magazines of the same name come together through Karayannopoulou’s playful gestures and carve out new narratives - breaking aesthetic norms. In the exhibited artworks, female entities escape the male gaze and return to the realm of their own pleasure, wandering in natural landscapes, creating corporeal complexes with plants, animals and flamboyant objects. The artist exposes the male-imposed performativity in the female portrayal with irony, playfulness and humor and invents a space anew, where femininity is liberated and reclaims the rules of its own representation.
For the printed edition of JANUS II curator Christina Petkopoulou, edits the accompanying texts creating a collage of excerpts from “Secrets of Loveliness” (1964), a best-selling guidebook for young women, and lyrics from songs that were in the charts of the same year. Each Janus image is titled with this collaged text.
