May 20th 2018

Women Painting Men

@ Riverside Arts Center Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden

32 E Quincy St, Riverside, IL 60546

Opening Sunday, May 20th, from 3PM - 6PM

On view through Saturday, June 23rd

The Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden is pleased to present Women Painting Men, a group exhibition guest curated by Gwendolyn Zabicki and featuring the work of six female painters: Karen Azarnia, Mel Cook, Katie Hammond (Halton), Jessica Stanfill, Celeste Rapone, and Gwendolyn Zabicki.

In this show, we see portrayals of men that run from sexual to sympathetic to sentimental. The exhibition asks viewers to consider: is the female gaze simply a reversal of the male gaze–that is to say, men rendered as sexual objects for the viewer’s pleasure; or is the female gaze best understood as a new generation of women learning to look at themselves and others in a new way?

Laura Mulvey coined the term “the male gaze” in her 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In the essay, she states that the female gaze is women looking at themselves through the eyes of men. More than 40 years have passed since Mulvey wrote her still powerful essay. Do alternative modes of seeing and representation exist in the world, or are artists and viewers alike still trapped in a binary of active and passive?

Also opening in RAC’s FlexSpace: Amy Babinec: Golden Rule
Curated by RAC Arts Programming Manager Natalie Jacobson
On view May 20- June 23, 2018

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