Henbane : Medicine Park Gallery : Chicago : March 2008

You can read a great review of Henbane here: NewCity Review by Kelly McClure. The show was also featured in the Chicago Reader and reviewed as 5 stars by Time Out Chicago.

Henbane : Dialectics of the Feminine Sublime is currently up at Medicine Park Gallery, a new artspace here in Chicago. The show features work by Meg Leary, Molly Schafer, Amber Hawk Swanson and Stacia Yeapanis.

Henbane runs from March 21st to April 21st 2008 with an Opening Reception March 21, 7pm to 11pm and a video screening at 8pm. (The opening was much, much fun! We had a huge turnout despite the freak snowstorm.)

Below is an excerpt from a short essay Molly & I wrote for the show:

Unlike the traditional sublime, the feminine sublime does not domesticate the object that might be a source of threat. Instead, it accepts the relationship of both pleasure and pain, or life and death, and the potential dispersal of the self. – Joanna Zylinska

Henbane opens with the full Crow Moon on March 21st and will include a gallery exhibition and video screening. The cast of characters featured in Henbane includes Hillary Clinton, Female Centaurs, Xena Warrior Princess, Feral Girls and a Real Doll special ordered in the artist's image. The interdisciplinary exhibition includes photographs, drawings, videos, appropriation-works and wee sculptures that often refuse to make hierarchies or distinctions between classes of knowledge, medias or genres.

The artists of Henbane are also part of an art collective that maintains a critical core centered on feminism, identity, fantasy, political activism, environmentalism, and culture studies. Henbane seeks to draw on this gestalt, focusing the central energy of the group towards the innate conflicts and resolutions located within and between gender and sex.

Like these dialectics, the feminine sublime is inherently hybrid, dispelling gender-specific ideas associated with the traditional sublime. The theory of the feminine sublime proposes a way to view the external world that welcomes the dissolution of fixed identity as a means to extend our respect and understanding outwards --- from a self-core unafraid to fluidify it's boundaries.

Medicine Park
2659 W. Chicago Ave.
Chicago, IL 60622
medparkchicago.com.
myspace.com/medparkchicago.
|medicineparkchicago@gmail.com|.
773.255.5582

Gallery hours are Sundays 12pm-6pm and by appointment.