@ Riflemaker Gallery
To see until the end of this month, Hear What I Say, by British artist Penelope Slinger (b. 1947), at the Riflemaker Gallery - London.
The exhibition is mainly composed of photographic collages from the 1970s. "In these pices, Slinger uses the tools provided by Surrealism to penetrate the female psyche, presewnting herself as both subject and object in a group of collages and montages which sidestep the then current themes of 1960s and 70s art."
Maxa Zoller writes in her essay for the little catalogue that accompanies this exhibition:
"I have been wondering: why Slinger's images are not joyful celebrations of female liberation? Was the 'pill', or the 'cap', the independence of women from patriarchy leading to economic, intellectual and political self-determination, not reason enough for the production of more victorious symbols? Slinger's collages resist an all-too-easy process of 'liberation', a term fashionable in the counter-cultural middle class of the '60s generation, but which in reality only hides repressive libertarian ideology, according to Philippe Sollers. Penny's images could be described as acts of morning. It is as if the artist seeks to destruct and sacrifice (from Latin: make holy) the space of domesticity traditionally assigned to the woman/womb.
Another exhibition by a woman artist, quite active in the '70s that became invisible afterwards, in her case probably because she left the UK to the West Indias and the the United States, finding now a renovated interest after her photo-collages were shown at Tate St Ives in 2009 as part of The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in Modern Art.
Until 30 October
at the Riflemaker Gallery
79 Beak Street
London W1F 9SU
there is a performance on the ground floor by Alice Anderson (b. 1976) From Dance to Sculpture
