SOUTH FLORIDA WOMEN ARTISTS AT LARGE

For the fourth consecutive year, the Doral Contemporary Art Museum (DORCAM) celebrated Women’s International Month during the month of March. This year, with an exhibition titled South Florida Women Artists At Large, that opened on Saturday, March 6th, 2021 in Suite 129 of City Place Doral. A total of ten local women artists participate in the exhibition, curated by Dainy Tapia, who has been collaborating with the museum since 2018.

The participating artists are Liene Bosquê, Carola Bravo, Jeanne Jaffe, Regina Jestrow, Karla Kantorovich, Kerry Phillips, Evelyn Politzer, Jennifer Printz, Kristen Thiele, and Lisu Vega.

The title South Florida Women Artists At Large alludes to the attitude of freedom the selected artists show in their creative process. These ten women are fearless in their artistic endeavors: creating in a wide variety of materials, mediums, and techniques, and covering an ample range of themes.

Most of the works selected are intentionally large, to give these women artists the opportunity to take as much space as possible for their creations. Space is usually a coveted commodity, especially for women, literally and figuratively. But these artworks are not only large, and expansive, most of them also have the possibility to grow, to extend to even larger dimensions. The exhibition intends to play with the ideas of freedom and size. In this case, the freedom to work in a large format, the freedom of taking up as much space as possible, and the freedom to work in an unconventional fashion.

In the exhibition, there are pieces created with unusual materials, such as Liene Bosquê’s A Nation’s Cloth, an abstraction of weaving patterns used by slaves in cotton plantations in the United States made with Olefin wristbands. There are assemblages of found objects as in the case of artists Kerry Phillips and Karla Kantorovich’s work, both working with discarded objects ranging from window screens to air conditioning filters and lamps. The use of traditionally feminine materials and techniques in a very contemporary way is represented by the ‘drawings’ with wool by Evelyn Politzer’s Thread of Connection, the abstract geometric Americana Quilts by Regina Jestrow, and the large hand-woven rope sculpture Campo Abierto by Lisu Vega.

Artist Kristen Thiele mixes humor with a most classical oil painting technique, presenting an enormous piece (8 feet-long) stating in large letters ‘The End”, playing with the viewers expectative to find something to look at in the painting, just to be confronted instead with that most definitive declaration.

Artist Carola Bravo created an immersive installation, InsideOut #2, a combination of video and site-specific drawings, exploring the ideas of memory and hope, in a piece about rediscovering forgotten intimate spaces during the time of confinement last year.

Artist Jeanne Jaffe brings a surrealist touch to the exhibition with her sculptural pieces, hybrid representations of human parts, and other organic forms or objects combined in shapes of her own creation.

Lastly, artist Jennifer Printz created an intriguing piece, Toward Innumerable Futures, using a photographic collage of sky images she has been taking for years, printed on fabric, in a piece that partly evokes a quilt, partly a very feminine long train gown, that flows from two starting points, as waterfalls into a river, materializing the very idea of being at large.