REVERSE WOMEN (2023)

LED video billboard, silent

Images of running women advance backwards in slow motion, as if the ground is being pulled out from under them, unsettling representations of femininity, agency, power, and progress. Unfolding backward in time, the work creates a sense of suspension, frozen yet always in motion. Reverse Women (2023) seeks to balance and hold multiple positions: affirming the strength and solidarity of women, while also expressing ambivalence and alienation in relation to the category of woman and attendant forms of exclusion. Whether the solitary subjects of Reverse Women (2023) are viewed as heroic or unsettling—or both—will vary along with shifting notions of gendered experience, locating an interval between identification and dis-identification. The gesture of running is pivotal, seen both as a sign of practiced liberation, wellness, and resilience, as well as a symptom of horror: escape, exhaustion, and flight. 

As in pharmaceutical advertisements, women run alone, generic stand-ins for the absence of pain. Mimicking the limited visual language used to define the intersection of liberation, care, and femininity, Reverse Women (2023) points to a system of limits that hold (or haunt) the subjects even as they enact a performance of feeling free.

Seen in reverse, desaturated, and in slow motion, an element of horror is inserted, along with a critique of implicit attitudes toward freedom and femininity within a nexus of gender, race, class, illness, and disability.

Commissioned by the City of West Hollywood Moving Image Media Art Program (MIMA)

Feb 1 – May 31, 2023 at 8743 Sunset Blvd. West Hollwood