Anat Ebgi is pleased to present a selection of works from the 1980s and 1990s by Tina Girouard and Faith Wilding. Each of these artists utilize craft practices and forms and techniques assigned in history to women, such as watercolor or textile arts, as a means to investigate natural motifs and subvert the iconographic canon dominated by white males.
Tina Girouard’s sequins works from the early 1990s were made in collaboration with the Vodou Flag makers of Haiti. The glittering imagery is rooted in her practice as a post-minimalist and Pattern and Decoration artist. Countering austere minimalist art with exuberant color, eclectic compositions, and unorthodox new materials Girouard reflected Louisiana’s diverse local culture, while also looking into the wider world. Her compositions include references to a global range of cultures and the sequins works celebrate the power of collaboration and cross-cultural dialogue, while raising questions about authorship, ownership, and authenticity.
Faith Wilding’s paintings and drawings construct a world where nature and humans are part of each other—creative energies and forms of the imagination that are simultaneously generative and destructive. Her visual language draws from vast sources of inspiration including recurring motifs of seed pods, embryos, thrusting leaves, continents, geodes, and other organic forms suggestive of wombs. Wilding’s work is potent with ideas of genesis, transformation, life cycles, and personal mythologies; her vibrant paintings express interconnectedness and spiritual exuberance.
The works for OVR’s Survey sector direct focus to topics such as domesticity, feminist imagery, nature, and an increasingly globalized world. Both artists seek to supplant male dominated narratives and offer feminist counterpoints to Western art historical iconology.
