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‘The Tearaways’ Present Visionary Ambitions of Women in Art
The Tearaways, the Women’s Month group exhibition at Modeka Art, featured thirteen different artists curated by Stephanie Frondoso whom she believed had interesting artistic “investigations” with their practices today.
Unique and singular artists like Tekla Tamoria, Aze Ong, Jill Paz, and Christina Lopez find themselves given a space and spotlight to showcase their current passions and fascinations—and how these works function to open up artworks to new horizons today.
“Instead of imposing a woman-centered theme, we invited them to share parcels of insight into the evolution of their work,” Frondoso wrote on her write-up of the exhibit. “In championing these artists, the exhibit underscores the vital role of women in art and society, fostering sustained recognition and support for their valued contributions.”
Bigger Spaces, Bigger Ideas
As an exhibition, Frondoso planned The Tearaways to allow these artists—typically not given a chance to go big in terms of the scale of their projects—to expand and install their works in a giant space that belies the ambitions behind their artworks.
For example, Frondoso chose to project textile artist Tekla Tamoria’s frame-by-frame stitch animation in the center of the exhibit. The projection covers almost half of the wall and was the first thing one notices when entering the space. Typically, gallery spaces are small enough that Tamoria’s works are usually put on a television screen, but the choice highlights the hand-crafted artistry central to her work.
“Her studio is just a tiny bedroom,” Frondoso explained. “So [the work] takes up little space and the video [is stored] just in [one’s] laptop or in a chip. But I deliberately made it huge because […] it puts a new context on all of it, because this work is about artistic labor and the fact that she’s unraveling a knot, it’s almost like she’s untangling old ideas. Or she’s trying to untangle what’s there.”
Grandness with Marginalized Mediums
This is a recurring theme for The Tearaways: giving space for bigger ambitions of female artists to be realized on a grander scale. The Modeka Art space especially works best for this due to their high ceilings and spacious architecture. A large fabric work by Aze Ong can be exhibited in the space alongside a sculptural rendition of a memory of rain at the ocean by Kelli Maeshiro and it fits together in the same space.
The one people have certainly fixated on is Brisa Amir’s collage of nature in an urban environment. Her work here was set-up with largeness in mind, and that scale brought out new dimensions of her work that made it both sculptural and painterly at the same time.
“She’s trying to capture the urban environment when there’s markings every day from gas bills or from coffee,” Frondoso said. “So it’s a combination of markings from the environment on urban structures, but also nature. It looks like nature, right? [Like] nature slowly making its process felt in the environment by growing through cracks, crawling over gates, also incrementally.”
Going Beyond the Old Ideas
The Tearaways challenge the past status quo with some of the artists that they exhibit. Christina Lopez, for example, created landscape artwork for this exhibit from computer punch cards. The methodology, Frondoso explained, was because of how women tended to do secretarial or clerical work like that in the past and the present.
Even in the age of artificial intelligence, the grunt work of cataloguing and archiving akin to that still needs to be done. Lopez uses the tools of the past to bring our mind towards the importance of that work in our progress, and the role that women play to ensure that progress happens.
Meanwhile, artists like Ong, Tamoria and Jan Sunday utilize crochets and stitching to create the artworks in their exhibit. Frondoso was intentional in their inclusion. It’s expansionary in our conception of what counts as art, she said, removing the stigma on forms and mediums that would otherwise not be respected.
“For the longest time, women artists were sort of overlooked or undervalued because of the material that they used, but now it’s starting to be accepted. Textile is fine, [but] it historically shows that if you look at the statistics of different museums and women’s work, even with all the progress we’ve made, it’s still underrepresented.
“So it’s an effort that needs to be continuous, and we have to continue doing it up until there’s gender equality in the arts. Gender equality [in] everything. The pricing—they don’t have that many opportunities,but luckily that change is happening. We just have to continue and together they have a strong voice because together it’s clear the range of material and concepts and ideas.”
The Fearlessness in Women Artists
Frondoso chose the title “tearaways” because of its link to the word “rebels.” She saw these artists as rebellious and brave due to their usage of whatever medium they could use to convey the messages they wanted. With womanhood being painted by the patriarchy as demure and quiet, The Tearaways showcase just how explosive and ambitious artwork by women could really be when given the capacity and resources to do so.
“Some time ago, some male curator told me he noticed that women artists are fearless,” Frondoso shared. “I asked a woman artist, ‘is that true?’ Because paintings are safe sometimes. And she said, yeah, because we never—it was a long time coming before having a voice. And the work’s always undervalued that there’s nothing to lose. So they just do what they want because they have nothing to lose. They put their cards on the table.”
Photos by Elle Yap.
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