Domesticada

JO-HS is pleased to present Domesticada, an all women’s show opening March 23rd in honor of International Women’s Month. This exhibition will bring together the works of women reflecting on the term Domesticated.

Distorting and disputing gendered archetypes and expressions, the featured artists include Rose Barberat, Alma Camelia, Clara Cebrian, Lucrezia De Fazio, Zahra Holm, Katarina Janeckova, Larissa de Jesús Negrón, Margot Kalach, Karen-Sofie Kvamme, Ángela Leyva, Pearlyn Lii, Sofia Lucarelli, Cassandra Mayela, Anico Mostert, Aurora Noreña, Perla Ruiz Basulto, Pauline Shaw, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, and María Vez.

The purpose of this show is to demonstrate and visualize how women, –in the past and even nowadays–,  have been predisposed to habit and live in certain domestic scopes. Women have always had this maternal role, –set by society and usually run by men–, which in part makes them more prone to set aside their aspirations and focus on raising and taking care of a family.

Therefore, by naming this show "Domesticada '' we want to question women's role nowadays. We want to highlight how each artist faces their reality and the effects this has had on their life, and consequently, on their work. Each artist's expressions will capture a different essence of what it means to be a woman in the art world, and how they relate to their femininity. By having this controversial title, we aim to demonstrate that women, and women artists are free. They can and will express themselves whichever way they want, and they are not bound to a single or "acceptable" form of expression.

Historically speaking, women artists, when they existed, have largely faded into obscurity: there is no female Michelangelo nor Da Vinci equivalent. In Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists Linda Nochlin wrote, "The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education." Because of women's traditional role as caregivers, most women were unable to devote time to creating art. In addition, women were rarely allowed entry into schools of art, and almost never allowed into live nude drawings classes for fear of impropriety. Therefore, women who were artists were largely wealthy women with leisure time who were trained by their fathers or uncles and produced still lifes, landscapes, or portrait work. Examples include Anna Claypoole Peale and Mary Cassatt.

As Nochlin rightly says at the beginning of the article—quoting Mill—we have not asked or formulated the right questions. We must break with the panorama of what we have normalized or simply taken for granted, in order to understand historical situations from another perspective and thus eliminate the cultural and ideological barriers that prevent new approaches.

The controversy remains in the statement that women will always have to decide between having a career or a marriage. Clearly, you can have both. But when are we going to be treated as equals? That is, marriage leads to having a home with children, and that requires a lot of work to maintain and move your family forward. At the same time, one has a professional career and has to work, so now two concerns are added on the shoulders of a person; family and career. To what extent will women have to work twice as hard to be seen as equals? It is no longer enough to be a housewife, now she must work, be a mother, be successful, take care of her personal care, keep the family happy, etc. Could it be that only by meeting all these "requirements" is the woman seen as equal? As Nochlin states, “solitude as the price of success or sex and companionship at the price of professional renunciation”.

About the artists

Rose Barberat (b. France 1994)
Rose Barberat (born in 1994 in Saint-Claude, France) lives in Paris and works in Clichy at Poush Manifesto. After studying Modern Letters at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, she graduated with a master degree in Creative Writing, later entering the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Paris.

Her first solo exhibition “Planétarium” in September 2021 at PACT gallery came after graduating the Beaux-Arts of Paris in July 2021. The exhibition received support from the CNAP (national centre of visual arts) for the first exhibition with a grant. She also presented a solo exhibition at Art Paris art fair, within the focus on the "Portrait and figuration" of Hervé Mikaeloff. Similar work was shown as part of the collective exhibition  “L'écume des songes” in September 2021 at Poush Manifesto, an artistic residency. Previously, she participated in several collective exhibitions in France, her work was also shown in several fairs as Fiac OVR 2021 and NADA Miami 2021 in the USA.

Rose Barberat develops fictional elements that disrupt reality, prompting us to question the porosity between reality and fiction. Her paintings are fictions of monochrome worlds, each distinctively marked by their own primary colours where she seeks to create a conversation between the duality of the probable, real, and fantastic from the beginning point of photographic sources. Working mainly on large scale portrait paintings, the artist seeks to convey an immersive experience through the use of the human scale. Contemporary society, humanity extracting symbols and visual signs anchored in our subconscious are utilised to propose a place of questioning our relations between ourselves and our surroundings.

Alma Camelia (b. 1992, State of Mexico)
Born in the state of Mexico, 1992. Visual artist graduated from the Faculty of Arts and Design, UNAM. She is part of the official selection of the XIX Biennial of Photography of the Center of the Image, Mx. She is currently producing her new pictorial project. She has exhibited in Latin America and Mexico, including The Biennial of Moving Image BIM, Buenos Aires, Center of the Image, ENPEG La Esmeralda, and 123 Gallery. She is the creator of Lolita Pank, a platform that connects and exhibits creative women’s and lgbtq+ projects. She is currently producing a film series about disappearance in Mexico with the support of FONCA.

In her series on the display Ways to Read the Time, Through mass and ripping, through wear and tear, through light and shadow, through perspective and saturation, through action, through gesture and clutter. This series is made up of pictorial works that extract cinematographic scenes and take up the idea of footage or analogous intervention on cinematographic films. I elaborate actions as footage, in which I add or remove gestures to construct another temporary reading of the scene from matter, or new readings of time and space.

Clara Cebrian (b. Madrid, 1991)
Clara Cebrian is a self-taught artist whose works in painting, animation, ceramics and textile design. She is influenced by memory and transitory feelings to create abstract works of smaller figurative details which narrate places in the and the reality of what is immediately happening in the studio. Her minimal expressions can be seen in the work exhibited for Domesticada, which deals with the way that time can be woven and turned into tangible physical reality. These works came about through the concept of repetition and the soothing feeling of contemplating the result of many hours. She has participated in group exhibitions between Madrid and London.

Lucrezia De Fazio (b. Rome 1993)
Lucrezia de Fazio is a visual artist working across drawing, installation, photography and jewellery. She graduated from London’s Central Saint Martins in 2017.

Her work investigates the spheres of intimacy, sexuality and desire, where the subject of the female body plays a recurrent role in being desexualised, self-represented and a witness of alternating axes of pain and pleasure, violence and tenderness. Through introspection of encounters, with herself, her own body, its texture, its shape, or with someone else, remembering the moment of the encounter and revealing it through her artistic practice roots her work in sculpture, the transformation of matter and relationships between the organic and inorganic.
She has been an artist-in-residency at the Stokkoya Collaborative Residency, Norway and Casa Lu and has participated in international art fairs including Salon Acme, . Her work has been exhibited in the UK, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Spain, and Mexico.

Zahra Holm (b. 1989)
Originally from Sweden and Tunisia, contemporary artist Zahra Holm lives and works in Paris, France. She started drawing at a young age and began developing her love for arts; she is a self-taught painter, primarily working with oil paint. She has earned a diploma in Scenography and Set Design whilst studying and has worked for several years in cinema, theatre and french television. The aesthetic of her work is reminiscent of the mid-century modernist painters and her fascination with the female form makes up the main subject of her work. Her bold use of colour and curvaceous lines create striking compositions that reflect the beauty and power of women. These suggestions of femininity, based on what is conventionally considered female, symbolically female, close to abstraction. Her work is a tribute to the essence of femininity - discovering imperfection. In light with contemporary society’s pursuit of perfection, she filters her personal experiences, questioning herself through abstraction and simplification. The colours and shades in her work are colourful and warm, spontaneously influenced by the light, the seasons and the mood of the artist.

Katarina Janeckova (b. Bratislava 1988)
Katarina is a painter residing in Corpus Christi, Texas. From 2009 to 2013, she pursued her education and received an MA in Painting from the Academy of Fine Art in Bratislava with her first solo show in 2009. Inspired by the roles of masculinity and femininity, the wide availability of sexual content, and challenging the male gaze through sexual liberation, Janečková Walshe uses playful colors and characters to direct and discover the role of sexuality in the modern world. Cartoonish bears depict the virility of men while beautiful women in Rococo colours play and pose for the audience, allowing viewers to reflect on their own preconceived notions of gender roles and identity.

No stranger to representing dichotomies in her work, and as a European in America, Katarina is also fascinated with eccentricities of what she has witnessed from American life in Southern Texas, exploring gym culture, American masculinity, and the Southwestern landscape. With the birth of her first child and residing in a new country so different from her own, Katarina tackles the beautiful and surreal moments of day-to-day life with work that reflects these new adventures. She has shown internationally in five countries with a large following around Europe and North America.

Larissa de Jesús Negrón (b. Puerto Rico 1994)
New York City based artist Larissa de Jesús Negrón grew up in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. Since graduating in 2017, she has continued to work at the Museum of Modern Art.

Bringing about a non-linear reflection on the concept of distance, which often develops into an inward-looking speculation, in time and space.
Influenced by neo-surreal imagery, the artist’s curiosity of the subconscious and Neuroticism prompts her work with an interest in healing to address her childhood and adult trauma. These mundane moments of despair, fear and excitement are brought to the eyes of the viewer as a cathartic way to connect and she writes that “for all of us, the expression of emotion is essential to overcoming trauma”

Larissa’s interpretations of themes of nostalgia and isolation of interior life backgrounds her yearning for introspection, self-evaluation and amelioration through her intimate, often otherworldly indoor/outdoor mirages. The topic of introspection through spirituality and self-criticism inside of the home has been a recurring theme in Larissa’s work.

Margot Kalach (b. Mexico City 1992)
Margot studied photography at Bard College 2012-16 and earned Mexico’s FONCA Young Creators scholarship  2017-19. Her work centres around light, as her protagonist, primary language, and preferred visual medium within her practice in photography and video. She pursues to build systems that evolve towards an increasing complexity, with each work thought of as a closed system that begins with a set of ´elementary particles´, gradually evolving to a more organic or chaotic state. Her use of pre-existing fields of knowledge leads her to make use of geometry as a tool to explore this evolution of information and matter, understanding both the visible and invisible as inherently connected. These act as models, metaphors, and lenses, to assemble the structure of her own work and the networks of smaller constituents that continuously reorganise to create something larger than the sum of all parts.

Karen-Sofie Kvamme (b. 1988, Oslo)
Karen-Sofie Kvamme is an Oslo-born, Zurich-raised, creative living in Mexico City. Since 2019, she has worked at Kurimanzutto, Mexico City. Prior to moving to Mexico, she was the director at Galerie Maria Bernheim, Zurich, and an art consultant in Singapore. Karen-Sofie has an MA in Art Business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. Her photographs capture  what she sees—from the intimate to the everyday life.

Ángela Leyva (b. 1987, Mexico  City)
Graduated from the ENPEG “La Esmeralda” (2006-2010) and is currently studying a Masters of Visual Arts at UNAM. She is part of the 2019 generation at SOMA Mexico. And part of the Drawing Workshop of Gilberto Aceves Navarro (2006-2010). In 2019 she participated in the 12th Puebla Biennial, and in the V Edition of the Julio Castillo National Biennial. In 2018, received the honourable mention at the XVIII Rufino Tamayo Painting Biennial, as well as being awarded the painting acquisition award of the XXXVIII National Meeting of ´Young Art´. Between 2016 and 2017, she received the Young Creators / FONCA scholarship and was a beneficiary of the FOCAEM Program for the Encouragement of Artistic Creation and Development of the State of Mexico in 2011, 2012 and 2013. She has had several individual exhibitions, participated in different festivals, as well as different collective exhibitions inside and outside the country.

Pearlyn Lii (b. Hong Kong, 1993)
Pearlyn Lii is an artist from Hong Kong whose work examines identity narratives and archetypes. Her work weaves lived experience with the surreal, capturing the transient nature of the self through avatar, persona, mythology, and magical realism, confronting female archetypes through physical and sensory experiences. Lii’s cross-disciplinary practice exists across installation, performance, and code-based media. Her work has been recognized by Art in America, Dezeen, Vogue Italia, Wallpaper*, Forbes, Foundation.app, and the Society for Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD). Lii is an alumna of New Museum's incubator NEW INC, under the Art+Code track supported by Rhizome, and currently an artist-in-residence at JO-HS. She is also the founder of nonstudio based out of New York.

Sofia Lucarelli (b. London, 1994)
Sofia Lucarelli is a British artist currently based in Mexico City who works in a range of media spanning from oil painting to digital art and graphic design. She is influenced by memories of passing moments and scenes, drawing inspiration from natural and man made patterns which make their way into her figurative work. Her current series ‘women in their downtime’ opens a window into these fleeting junctures, bringing together figures from an everyday scenario, exploring encounters

Cassandra Mayela (b. Caracas 1989)
Cassandra Mayela is a self-taught textile artist working and living in New York since her forced migration from Venezuela in 2014. Her personal experiences as an immigrant and a woman of colour have shaped her curiosity for clothing’s story-telling capacity and how migration affects one’s identity and feelings of belonging. In doing so, her work is largely community-orientated, exploring the idea that fundamental changes in fabric can affect one’s perception of identity, highlighting new avenues of empowerment.

She has forthcoming fellowships with Amant (May 2022) where she will create educational workshops in response to the work of Argentine-Brazilian textile artist Carla Zaccagnini; and at Succurro, where she will consider how to more deeply link her textile practice to the land

Anico Mostert (b. South Africa, 1995)
Anico Mostert is a multi-disciplinary artist and printmaker who lives and works in Cape Town. She graduated from Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2017, where she majored in printmaking. Her work speaks to the quiet moments of the everyday, exuding a calm quietness, illustrating unexpected details and unassuming scenarios that verge on the mundane but are illuminated through her attention and careful colour choices. Her approach to making is versatile, and she works across ceramics, textile design, animation and painting. Anico has also been a part of several solo and group exhibitions in South Africa.

Anico allows her practice to be intuitive and exist as a process of learning and discovery, creating a space for vivid colours and coltish figures to find their place in paintings and prints. She uses reference images from social media to imagine still lifes of ordinary scenes, that feel familiar and comforting but are also somewhat inverted and distorted to feel fresh and unexpected. Each piece’s name occurs as she imagines what it would say if it could speak. Her work upends familiarity; reminiscent of home spaces, yet offering a surreal swing of imagery, where rooms are unpeopled and yet full of life, and pictures of people are empty of objects.

Aurora Noreña (b. Mexico City, 1962)
Her artistic work is constantly reconfigured due to new experiences and readings that transcend her, she believes almost permanently that an artist must show a particular and localized way of being in the world. Aurora has a particular interest in the spaces in which we develop physically, socially and mentally, believing that they are the containers of collisions, contagions and alloys, that is, the mysteries that make us up.

Noreña studied architecture at the Autonomous Metropolitan University and Visual Arts at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Exploring time and memory through pre-hispanic heritage. Her recent exhibition at ArtSpaceMexico brought into question issues surrounding the trafficking of cultural property and her “symbolic repatriation” of works residing abroad.

Perla Ruiz Basulto
Is a Mexican artist working primarily in painting and sculpture. She studied Fine Arts at Universidad de las Américas Puebla, and is currently based in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas. Her work is based on the analysis of her every day life between her walks on the streets, taking the public transport and listening to passerby talks. Her interests include performance and space interventions.

She was awarded the Pamela Ann Marquad scholarship in 2019-2020 and had the chance to do the styling for the short film “Lucia desde el espacio” from Vacío Media.

Pauline Shaw (b. 1988)
Pauline Shaw is a Taiwanese-American multidisciplinary artist born in Kirkland, Washington. Through sculpture, textiles, and installation, she examines how personal history and cultural knowledge are acquired and preserved. She examines both historical and modern representations of self-identity and lineage through her large-scale felted panes and multimedia sculpture and uses personal and collective histories to create tangible artefacts.

Shaw has exhibited work at Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore; Gagosian, New York; and Almine Rech Gallery, Paris.

Her work at JO-HS is a combination of imagery from myths and folktales related to created stories and collaged images of body and brain based on the preliminary idea that one's own personal history is a form of myth and belief.

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (b. 1988, Mexico City)
Frieda Toranzo Jaeger is a Mexican artist who lives and works in Berlin. She completed her MFA degree at the Hamburg Kunst Akademie, and in 2017 had a solo exhibition at Reena Spaulings, New York. Recent group shows include Green Tea Gallery at Federico Vavassori, Lerchenfeld I at Kunstverein Schwerin, Merlin at SORT in Vienna.

Toranzo Jaeger’s work is a hybrid creation of strange, seductive paintings about cars and the female body that collapse traditional depictions of hyper-sexualized femininity. Employing to market the masculine appeal of a vehicle, her work reclaiming the latent power of the car as a site for unrestrained female sexuality. Carefully selected motifs are deliberately imbricated within the painting which subvert traditionally feminine depictions of nature, with the use of juxtaposed embroidered canvases with symbols of mechanisation. These rub up against and come into conflict with more conventional signifiers of masculinity, power and taste, embodied in decoration and cars.

María Vez (b. 1994, Culiacan)
María studied at Universidad de los Américas, Puebla (2015-2020) and currently lives in Cholula, Puebla. She has co-founded the independent artist residency program Sabrosas Asociadas and continues to self-publish her poetry and short stories which are activated in public readings at exhibition sites.

She also works in digital collages and collage-like paintings. Her paintings express ideas on body image, gender roles, fantasy and sexuality - themes that can be seen across her various mediums.
She has also collaborated with independent projects such as La Nana, Más Allá, Impronta Lab and Termostato. In July 2021, she exhibited a joint show Ghosted at Pandeo.