Heathers @ Rubus Discolor Project

Heathers
Amy Bay, Melanie Flood, Rainen Knecht and Bobbi Woods

July 15- August 15, 2020
@
Rubus Discolor Project
Portland, OR

Rubus Discolor Project is pleased to announce Heathers , a group exhibition featuring artists whose work shares an interest in notions of vanity, homage, connection, desire, beauty and frivolity. The artists prize the transition to womanhood and see it as a difficult but fertile time that is a source to draw from and celebrate. Working with painting, photography, and appropriated materials, their practices are united by concerns surrounding female stereotypes and the cultural expectations, pressures and contradictions they embody.

Amy Bay’s aggressively decorative work probes the subtle and not so subtle ways that “feminine” content is dismissed and quieted. Her heavily worked floral paintings use motifs and imagery that borrow from decorative arts, craft traditions, nostalgia, and discourses of politeness within our culture that have historically been framed as female.

In a departure from her constructed still life photography, Melanie Flood pulls photos from her personal archive to create an homage to a beloved friend, Sasha, whom she both adored and feared. Taken in the 1990’s during her teenage years while still learning her craft, Flood documented Sasha in the apartment she shared with her Mother, which felt like an extension of the girl herself. The photos represent a period of experimentation with drugs, problematic sexual encounters and aggression, but also a time of intimacy and sweetness. They are a testament to girlhood and all its complications.

The figures in Rainen Knecht’s paintings are at once seductive and discomfiting. Posing dutifully for the viewer, they upend any kind of objectifying gaze as they edge towards the feral. Drawn from fables, horror films, movie posters and folk costumes, Knecht’s worlds are imbued with otherworldliness that borders on tenderness. But there is also a sense that these girls will not be easily controlled.

Bobbi Woods' works document and reframe the popular idioms, brutal banalities, and nervous tensions between pleasure and hilarity, fear and desire. In this exhibition, spray painted movie posters complicate time as it relates to manufacture of desire. Something has happened or will happen—its format conjures unrequited allure. Energetic and unruly, austere or sarcastic, they try on different voices while inserting them into the predominantly masculine order of advertising, taunting language as form, material and visceral space.