EVE/EVA

LUISA CALDWELL
SARAH COOTE
TZIREL KAMINETZKY
EDEN MORRIS
DAN TOROP

March 20 - April 24, 2021
Open Friday, Saturday & Sunday 1-7PM

 

link to Press Release as pdf

Tomato Mouse is proud to welcome you live and virtually to an exhibition of photographs by Dan Torop, photo collages by Tzirel Kaminetzky, bead curtains by Luisa Caldwell and paintings by Eden Morris and Sarah Coote which relate to maternity and nurturance.  The artists are of different ages, parents and not.  The repetition and slight alteration of a name suggests a shifting identity rather than a binary, not a refutation of the modernist refusal of heredity a’ la Artaud or myth of the lone genius but an investigation of creativity together with creation.

The exhibition runs March 20 through April 24, 2021 and will be open Fridays, Saturdays & Sundays from 1 to 7PM and by appointment.  The all-day socially distanced opening reception is Saturday March 20 1 – 9PM. 

In her multimedia photographic collages Tzirel Kaminetzky reframes the continuums of mundane imagery produced by digital means back into particular moments.  Finding herself due to quarantine with an extended period at home, she produced a body of diminutive collages “Domestic Material: Kitchen Table (socially distanced)”.  An artist already concerned with the dissolving sense of the personal, in these works she captures the brevity and intensity of lived experience while maintaining privacy by locating her subjects between frames. 

Looking at Dan Torop’s images of a child photographed in Chicago and Brooklyn during 2016 evokes a sublime sense of scale, how the tininess of infancy forces us to reckon the strangeness of what is human.  He states that the process of photographing was not exactly observing how strange the infant is but also learning who the infant is.  The individual chose how they will appear with the artist’s assistance. These works may be viewed only in person.

Having collected glass beads over a lifetime, in "Mamma Me", Luisa Caldwell has constructed a self-portrait that is also a portrait of her mother as a hanging curtain of beads with ovaries made from the beads of a grandmother's necklace.  She describes the familiarity of the related body, identity that is in continuity as well as distinct. Other works in the series are" Mamma Micio", her former cat and home companion;" Mamma Mare", depicting a hieroglyph wave referencing her son as an Aquarius and born in 2000 (MM); and "Mamma Mondo", she says, 'of course, our dear Mother Earth".  Beads strung on strings tied to branches to create pictograms of waves, earth and a cat evoke the primary activities of craft, making an image like a child fascinated by material. 

Eden Morris’ paintings reclaim biblical fertility tales in fierce protective narratives and lyrical explorations of longing.  “Hannah’s Dream” is an Annunciation of dreamlike strangeness that depicts the delirium of surrender.  Beyond a feminist revision of founding myths and art history, the universal is located within the personal. 

In “Rules Abound” Sarah Coote paints a sticker pack composition of 60 miniskirt clad red delicious apples overlaid on an office plant.  Internet porn culture of repetitious fantasy scenarios overlap with domesticated nature.  Her paintings send up mythologies of the feminine from the innocent to the witch, L’Inconnue de la Seine to Medusa.  Together they map an artificial space of overdetermined play that turns out to be another Edenic garden of temptation and blame.  Occasionally it is interrupted by pets gone wild.  This reckoning is still in process.

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