The sound piece shh at Current Space by Carrie Fucile creates an anxiety that the rest of the exhibition, FORCE: on the Culture of Rape, intensifies.
Carrie’s ssh (a pulsating base and reverberating “ssh-ssh-ssh”) is a constant reminder that rape is a topic shrouded in silence. As Force curators Hannah Brancato and Rebecca Nagle tell us: “We need a conversation that goes beyond ‘Rape is wrong’ …” (Listen to Rebecca and Hannah in an interview with Peter Boyce on Radar Redux.)
At the show’s entrance (and exit), Sarah McCann invites us to answer the question “What is Rape?” We can add comments to the wall, deposit our private thoughts into a lockbox, or toss our writing into the trash. “Rape erases humanity,” proclaims one of a dozen notes left by viewers.
Proving that curators Hannah and Rebecca are as committed to social change as they are to art, we can also leave with information in the form of educational pamphlets: “Ask First!,” “Let’s talk about Consent, Baby,” or “Supporting a Survivor of Sexual Assault.”
In the video All That Sheltering Emptiness, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and Gina Carducci invite us into the daily routine of a New York City callboy. We pass through hotel lobbies and elevators, bedrooms and bathrooms, settings for a conversation about what consent means to a sex worker. The callboy’s honesty is painful: New York is a lonely place and he feels stupid, but it’s alright, “except for the shaking afterwards.”
http://www.vimeo.com/15925364
Robby Rackleff’s eerily silent animation is less explicit but equally unsettling. In it, an enormous pickup truck looms in front of a lone house in a desolate landscape. The front door is open and we can see through an open window. No one is inside the brightly lit interior. The only movement comes from fuzz vibrating on the television screen. We are left with the disturbing feeling that this silence is not tranquil. Something bad has happened. We are just waiting anxiously to find out what.
Beneath the Skin, a 1981 video by Milwaukee artist Cecelia Condit , weaves together through narration and layered, fleeting images a bizarre tale steeped in violence and denial. The video relates the chilling account of a woman who discovers that for years her boyfriend concealed the shrink-wrapped body of a murdered girl in a closet of the apartment they shared.
In his drawing Scrapbook Repression, Martin Figueroa-Ramirez creates a collage of images and words that capture the shame and secrecy of sexual abuse. We see a child’s face, shattered among several torn images; a man’s belt, unbuckled; a stairway leading to a door, closed and maybe locked; and more disturbing images and words that suggest painful, tragic family histories.
Visit the exhibition at 8 p.m. on November 12, 13, or 14 to see Rebecca’s play on the subject of sexual abuse, DARB TV. Its set fills the back of the main gallery with two television screens embedded into the wall, decorative geometric designs, and a large circular face looming in the corner.
Worthy on both artistic and social levels, Force: on the Culture of Rape is at Current Space’s new gallery on Saturdays from noon to 4 p.m. until November 14. The gallery is located at 421 North Howard Street.
Filed in: Current Space.
Doreen Bolger is always on the move because she can’t stop seeing, supporting, and writing about the arts in and around Baltimore City. Her lengthy love affair for the arts began in Long Island when her father, an executive in the textile industry, brought home breathtaking fabrics every night from the heart of the garment district. 