Saturday 9 May 2015

Art Ltd - The Gender Gap


Great to see a review of my recent show at Sloan Projects in Santa Monica, by Molly Enholm in the May issue of Art Ltd, with a focus on the gender gap - Are Female artists still undervalued? Here is an excerpt from the review.

“The seeming dichotomy between the two series on view in the promising inaugural exhibition at Sloan Projects — three large-scale paintings by Claudia Parducci paired with a series of intimately scaled collaged photographs by Melinda Gibson — may have more in common than first glance might suggest. Though culled from disparate sources, each artist tackles iconic imagery in order to reassess the weight they typically wield.

Contrasting the monumentality of Parducci’s paintings are UK-based Melinda Gibson’s collage works. The ten individual works are installed in a repetitive manner, just below eye level, methodically spaced at regular intervals within identical frames. Where Parducci explores the sublime, Gibson mines the didactic; her collages are composed of the photographic images that fill the pages of Charlotte Cotton’s academic book “The Photograph as Contemporary Art,” which Gibson came across as a student at the London College of Communication. Forget writing in the margins; in these works Gibson literally deconstructs the authority of the academic text, as she cuts out, rearranges and overlaps the “textbook examples,” creating new meanings and associations from the photography of her predecessors. The motif of the human silhouette becomes a unifying element of these works, from layered images which form a Magritte-esque bust in Photomontage VII, to the sensuality of intertwined reclining figures fastened out of the interior scenes and landscape photography of Photomontage III, originally from pages 106, 136 and 202 from Cotton’s tome. Like Parducci, Gibson’s works prompts a desire to reassess the influence of the ubiquitous images from daily life, whether they aim to document or educate."


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