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Secondary Sex Characteristics

May 19 – June 19, 2012

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Opening reception Saturday May 19, 6-8pm

Proof Gallery
516 E. Second Street, Suite 20
South Boston, MA 02127
http://www.proof-gallery.com

Gallery Hours:
12 – 5pm Thursday – Saturday
or by appointment proof.gallery@gmail.com

In Secondary Sex Characteristics, Caitlin Berrigan lovingly inscribes the flecks, curls, and tangles of her subjects’ chest and nipple hair. The ink on vellum drawings linger perversely within notions of the secondary, the trivial, and the liminal. Unrelated to procreation—the alleged “primary” function of sex—these “secondary” sex characteristics denote seemingly insignificant difference. But might their inconsequence also imply a powerful unreliability and ambiguity? What if gender were defined by the quantity of hair on one’s chest? Its curliness? The shape and weave of one’s thatch?

While some subjects seem definitively male, others are indeterminate. Lifted from their bodies of origin, some drawings of thick chest hair take on the shape of female breasts, whereas those of nipple hair alone appear flat. Rather than deceiving us, these morphologies indicate that the signs of gender are unstable in the first place. They suggest a subversive power that the irrational secondary—usually an afterthought—holds over the dominant and material primary. The curving pathways and random streaks of chest and nipple hair remind us of the play, variation, and intermediacy that biology sprouts on our bodies: a randomness that thwarts our attempts to exclude and taxonomize. By fixating on the “secondary” sex characteristics, the artist moves us into a realm of overlapping and twisted contours of gendered belonging.

Secondary Sex Characteristics are a kind of intimate performance as portraiture that, like other works by Berrigan, leave us with indexical evidence. Roughly scaled to her own chest, the drawings trace relationships of longing. Some subjects have been lovers, while others are queer male artists who have been photographed bare-chested in their own work or for the media. The drawings bear evidence of how gender is not defined on its own, but is negotiated through and against the company we keep. The suggested in-betweenness of bisexuality, for example, disturbs any sense that desire flows from gender, or gender from sex. In homage, the drawings testify to the creative and subversive influence of the queer male art world, but they also point to the institutionalized exclusions within male-male practices of mentorship, brotherhood, and adoration. Haunting the gallery, these tenuous images undo and pluralize the gendered selves and embodied presentations they depict—hopelessly entangling emulation and desire.

. Matt Franks
Managing Editor, GLQ Journal
UC Davis Department of English, PhD Candidate

Caitlin Berrigan is an artist who works in performance, sculpture, video, and participatory actions to open spaces of potential within the context of social issues. Symbolically charged materials—milk, marshmallows, viruses, bodily organs—are put into tension with humor and disgust. Food, fluids, animals, biopolitics, social relations, pathetic gestures, civic agency—all are recurring ideas and materials in her practice. Rather than visualizing the unseen, she employs spatial aesthetics to make imperceptible forces an embodied experience.

Berrigan has created special commissions for the Whitney Museum of American Art and the deCordova Museum, and has exhibited her work internationally at venues including the Storefront for Art & Architecture in New York City, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Gallery 400 Chicago, Anthology Film Archives in New York City, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Lugar a Dudas in Bogotá, Colombia, 0047 Gallery in Oslo, Norway, and the 2010 Vancouver Olympics in Canada. She was an Agnes Gund fellow at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and has held residency fellowships at PROGRAM for Art & Architecture in Berlin, the Bioarts Initiative at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and MassArt. She holds a Master’s in visual art from MIT and a B.A. in art history and visual art from Hampshire College.

http://caitlinberrigan.com

This first volume of Emergency INDEX contains nearly 250 descriptions of performances* – dance, poetry, protest, theater, music, therapy, scientific research, advertising, terrorism and more. The publication enables artists to focus on the problems driving each work and the tactics used to address them. Including an index of terms shared by the diverse range of contributors connecting geographically or stylistically far-flung projects, INDEX provides a literary space for the artists to define the state of their field collectively.

*Includes Caitlin Berrigan & Anya Liftig’s performance Adoring Appetite.

In the midst of heated global discussions about economic and social structures, I am writing to ask for your help in realizing an upcoming video installation & participatory event that is in dialogue with many of these issues. The project, Spectrum of Inevitable Violence, will be part of the deCordova Museum’s 2012 biennial, curated by Dina Deitsch & Abigail Ross Goodman, with the support of the Boston Center for the Arts. (For more information, see the Boston Globe article.)

I am producing videos based on stories of class anxieties solicited from the public. Please help by sharing with me stories about your own class anxieties through the form linked below, and by forwarding this request widely among friends and family! I would love to hear from you by November 1st for the best possible time frame.

I also need to fund the production of the videos. I am offering a unique drawing of your own spectrum of social class, and two limited edition photographs from Spectrum of Inevitable Violence (2010) as part of Experience Economies, curated by Rebecca Uchill & Gavin Kroeber. I hope you will consider purchasing one of these prints, which will make my new work possible. Please see below for images & more information.

Thank you for your generous participation and support!

very best,
Caitlin

Prints & Editions

Caitlin Berrigan, Spectrum of Inevitable Violence (2011)
9 x 9″ silkscreen on paper with hand drawn ink
Unlimited edition print / unique drawing of your own spectrum of social class (take the survey, tally your scores in all categories, and I will draw your spectrum on the map)

$50 unframed

Write c@caitlinberrigan.com to inquire about purchasing

Caitlin Berrigan, Cultural Mobility (2010)
20 x 13.5″, Archival pigment print
4/5 available, $600 unframed / $900 framed

Write c@caitlinberrigan.com to inquire about purchasing

Caitlin Berrigan, Class Status (2010)
20 x 13.5″, Archival pigment print
4/5 available, $600 unframed / $900 framed

Write c@caitlinberrigan.com to inquire about purchasing

Caitlin Berrigan & Anya Liftig often use food in their work as a driving force of desire and social allegory. In this collaborative intervention, they will explore the obsessions, myths and terrors of motherhood through an act of  cannibalism. Amidst unsuspecting midday lunchers and farmers market shoppers, the two young & upright mommies will coddle, pet, kiss, lick and ultimately devour life-sized babies cast in fudge and cream.

Image photographer: Bami Adedoyin

*Three weekend interventions in New York City*

SkowheganPERFORMS | Socrates Sculpture Park
Sunday 25 September | 12 -3pm

http://www.socratessculpturepark.org/visit

Art in Odd Places Festival | 14th Street
Saturday 1 October | 11:30am – 2pm
Saturday 8 October | 11:30am – 2pm

http://www.artinoddplaces.org/artist.php?subj=60

Intervention begins on the Highline and continues along 14th Street into Union Square

10 – 12 June 2011 | 10am – 6pm | Governors Island NYC | Figment Festival

Caitlin Berrigan will present a new work for Governors Island. For the duration of the Figment Festival, she will enact a pathetic political gesture—circling around the perimeter of the island, endlessly declaring ‘Victory’ in an evaporating medium.

Victory Gardening was commissioned by Kleio Projects for The Purposeful Garden including work by artists Fabian Grateroles, Anne Percoco, Junko Sugimoto, and Mosstika.

For details on the festival and how to get to the island, please visit http://newyork.figmentproject.org. *Weather permitting*

Victory Gardening was produced during an invitational residency at The Wassaic Project, and made possible with the gracious assistance of Francis Rabkin, Janine Iversen, Storm Garner, Gina Siepel and Meredith Jenks.

As the final installment to the two exhibitions curated by Carson Chan in the spring of 2010, 0047 is proud to announce the launch of And the Seasons; They Go Round and Round, the catalog to the exhibitions of the same names. Featuring essays by New Yorker writer Nick Paumgarten, artist and writer Patricia Reed, and economist Amin Samman, the catalog seeks to expand the investigation of the overall geometry of our social, aesthetic and economic life that was initiated by the exhibitions.

http://0047.org/publications

Featuring work by AIDS-3D (US) Caitlin Berrigan (US) Daisy Ginsberg (UK) Elín Hansdóttir (IS) Markus Miessen (DE) Nicolas Dusollier (FR) Paolo Chiasera (IT) Patricia Reed (CA) Ralf Pflugfelder (DE) Sabina Grasso (IT) Sascha Pohflepp (DE) Susanne Gerber (DE) Thomas Eller (DE) Valerie Kolakis (CA).

More on the exhibitions

Open Phrases, cut-out paper print for The Anxious Prop, Case 4

Available for download at: http://www.theanxiousprop.org

This feuilleton is both a sporadic publication and a loose collective operating under the aegis of The Anxious Prop. That which is common is the desire to work with two looping, yet sequential parameters: 1. We are into the labor of producing forms, shapes, and figures as a method to explore collective knowledge by challenging the discourse of digital fabrication; 2. These forms, shapes, and figures emerge with the disposition to be activated, triggering their condition as theatrical objects and their consequent instrumental or anthropological role in the world.

Case 4 is co-directed by Jan Bovelet and Luis Berríos-Negrón, and contains contributions by Caitlin Berrigan, Luis Berríos-Negrón, Jan Bovelet, Rick Buckley, Eric Ellingsen, Tim Gough, Mendel Heit, Alexandra Hopf, Anna Kostreva, Boris Kajmak, Miodrag Ku, Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, Pia Marais, MIT Museum, Olivia Plender, The Product, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Carrie Roseland, Salottobuono, Gabi Schillig, George Stiny.