Dystopia Halted

Naomi White Alexandra Carter Amanda Rowan Ibuki Kuramochi Alicia Piller

Curator Ashley Lumb has gathered five female artists together for her Naked Lunch: each utilizing a composite of expressive mediums, including videoart, sculpture, photography, painting, and the performativity of the body, to explore issues of gender and autonomy following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June this year, a decision that threatens every woman’s ability to safely access abortion services.

Galvanized by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling, these multi-media artists present work – much of it brand new – that responds to this fresh attack on the rights of women following 50 years of legal protections, while highlighting the systemic injustices that this decision will exacerbate. Foregrounding biology, sexuality, inequity and female agency, these artists come together for a politically expedient brunch – one that might just escalate into a food fight.

San Diego artist Alexander Carter creates Dionysian images of female sensuality and excess, producing her phantasmagorical images with ink, silver leaf or juice from berries, and leaving a diffuse, translucent impression on atypical materials, including burlap, drafting film and linen. Her figures’ physicality is often grotesquely abundant, composed of engorged berries, and depicted merging, melting, or in the process of being consumed.

Her work underscores the porous boundary between the body and the natural world, a theme reiterated in the video art of Ibuki Kuramochi. The Japanese-born artist’s practice explores female biology, birth, death, and the maternal principle, through a lens of post-human feminism: framing the individual as a single node in a complex environmental matrix. Video works include Prenatal Memory and Species (2022), and combine performance, embryonic imagery, and the modern Japanese dance of Butoh, to express the mutability of the human body and its capacity for transformation.

Performance and photography converge in Amanda Rowan’s playful, and chromatically exuberant images. Her elaborately staged and highly feminine tableaus, often incorporating an obscured element of self-portrait, explore the power and vulnerability of womanhood. They’re suggestive of domestic servitude and subjugated female sexuality, although Rowan subverts gender stereotypes by introducing discordant elements – a pair of handcuffs, for example – into pristine, luridly exuberant scenes.

 Meanwhile, Alicia Piller wraps a treasure trove of artificial and organic materials – latex balloons, Christmas lights, raw opals, human teeth and cowrie shells – in vinyl to create sculptures that mimic organic forms at a cellular level. Working at the intersection of art and anthropology, her intricate pieces evolve into biological unfoldings of time: physical manifestations of environmental and historical traumas. For Spring/Break, Pilar will be making new work that reflects the mood of a post-Roe America.

 And finally, the photographic output of abolitionist feminist Naomi White incisively asks how we can move from an inherently self-serving, capitalist model of domination, to one of social justice and equity – one that not only benefits humanity, but the wider environment in a time of climate crisis. Through her use of layered photographs, collage and archival imagery, she interrogates hegemonic attitudes that permit inequality to flourish – and right now, that includes the troubling prohibition on a woman’s autonomy over her own body.