The Origin of the World / The Force of the Source / The Cause of the Vigor January 4th to March 30, 2013 Patty Chang, Tim Davis, Regina José Galindo, Daniel Gordon, Robert Gober, Kelly Kleinschrodt, Chloe Piene, Carolee Schneeman, Kirsten Stoltmann, Betty Tompkins, Anne Severson, Rohan Wealleans & Hannah Wilke sübsamsøn resident artist | CARLOS JIMENEZ CAHUA next sübsamsøn resident artist | SUSAN METRICAN Hours: Wednesday to Saturday: 11 to 6 & by appointment

Betty Tompkins Cunt Grid #4, 2003, archival ink stamp on paper, 14 x 11 inches

Samsøn is proud to present The Origin of the World / The Force of the Source / The Cause of the Vigor. This is the 1st curated group exhibition in the gallery since moving into the storefront space over 3 years ago. This is a consciously tactical group exhibition to consider the vagina as base of creativity and joy. Motherhood and femininity are perilous art historical territory. The exhibition will be viewed, gestate in stages, like life. It is partly titled 'the origin of the world' based on Courbet's painting of the same name. Some consider it the 1st conceptual painting. The physical origin of all. Tim Davis and Daniel Gordon’s photographs directly reference the Courbet painting. The exhibition also recalls Duchamp’s Étant Donnés, first exhibited in 1969, the same year Ida Applebroog began making her series of Vagina Drawings. Duchamp’s cogitation on his final work was due to lifelong research. He took great care in this final work detailing heavily its making. The exhibition is also motivated by Naomi Wolf's recent book, Vagina: A New Biography. Wolf connects the vagina with creativity itself. “When you honor a woman’s sexuality and her very sex, you support the optimal functioning of the physical systems that support her intellectual creativity…” She goes on to state, "The vagina serves, physiologically, to activate this matrix of chemicals that feel, to the female brain, like "the Goddess" -- that is, like an awareness of one's own great dignity, and of great self love as a woman, as a radiant part of the universal feminine." Certain orgasms connect to heightened transcendental moments. The little birth/death. Yes, Ellen, we are working with the normative. The god shaped whole/hole philosophers have written of? The longing human beings feel to connect with something greater than them selves. An oceanic sense of limitlessness. “I’ve always imagined triangulation (paternal object) as an ancestral totem–his totem–that grapples both materially and conceptually with issues of transparency, opacity, and gender. The three materials employed, a glass-like acrylic, a transparency, and a mirror materially relate to the seen and unseen aspects of water. However, the title assigns the object a gender and coyly points to myths behind the work, myths that cannot be accessed because of the deflection of the object, the artist, and the father.” - Kelly Kleinschrodt Chloe Piene’s unique drawing process can be seen in Unt. An in depth knowledge of the human skeletal system is evident. Carolee Schneeman’s photo documentation of her seminal performance Interior Scroll from 1975 will go on view as Robert Gober’s seminal Male and Female Genital Wallpaper from 1989 is present and uninstalled. "I thought of the vagina in many ways-- physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the sources of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation. I saw the vagina as a translucent chamber of which the serpent was an outward model: enlivened by it's passage from the visible to the invisible, a spiraled coil ringed with the shape of desire and generative mysteries, attributes of both female and male sexual power. This source of interior knowledge would be symbolized as the primary index unifying spirit and flesh in Goddess worship." – Carolee Schneeman Betty Tompkins' grid of Pussy Paintings considers many angles in monotone. Tompkins’ work was denied entry into France in 1973, but in 2003 the Centre Pompidou (Paris) acquired her work after its inclusion in the Lyon Biennale. “Knowledge of Tompkins’ paintings immediately broadened the repertoire of first generation feminist-identified imagery. More significantly, their materialization made manifest an unacknowledged precursor to contemporary involvement with explicit sexual and transgressive imagery.” -- Mitchell Algus, from a 2007 press release Kirsten Stoltmann's self-portrait, I Know You. “The impetus came from a friend saying "you should put a crystal in your vagina." so I did.” The vagina is gem, jewel, mineral and precious. Rohan Wealleans’ photographs combine performance, painting and sculpture to attempt an idealized and hyper-decorated woman. Regina José Galindo received the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale in 2005, in the category of “artists under 30”, for her video Himenoplastía. This work, nevertheless, got a particularly hostile reception during its first showing in Guatemala, in 2004. The controversial video depicted surgical reconstruction of the artist’s hymen. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_Jos%C3%A9_Galindo#cite_note-3) “…The Wandering Lake, the part where I went to Uzbekistan during my morning sickness. There is a parallel production of the body and the mind, the fetus and the project itself. … calls into question the role of the body of the artist during creation as a filter for experience and ideas. The trip revolved around gathering research for a possible production, and only stays as research. The images taken, snapshots revolve around trying to get to the dying lake and the people I interact with, its documentary in its aesthetic. The text is entries from my journals, a baby book on where my fetus is during the research trip and quotations from the readings I was doing during the trip.” - Patty Chang screened February 1st and March 1st, 2013 Anne Severson Near the Big Chakra, 1972, 17 minutes, color, silent “An unhurried view of 37 human female vaginas - ranging in age from three months to 56 years.” - Canyon Cinema screened February 1st: Hannah Wilke Through the Large Glass, 1976, 10 min, color, silent, 16 mm film on video “Hannah Wilke’s Through the Large Glass documents one of Wilke's most effective and well-known performances, in which she performs a deadpan striptease behind Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (also known as The Large Glass) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Dressed in a fedora and a white suit, and evoking the style of 1970s' fashion icons such as Helmut Newton and Yves Saint-Laurent, Wilke strikes a series of poses and then strips. She is seen through the glass of the Duchamp sculpture. In her self-conscious affectation of the often absurdist posturing of a fashion model, Wilke willfully uses her own image and her sexuality to confront the erotic representation of women in art history and popular culture. This piece was originally seen as part of an installation.” – Electronic Arts Intermix This exhibition is dedicated to Jeanette Ingberman (1952-2011). The art mother of many. For more information, contact samson@samsonprojects.com

This message was sent to @absolutearts.com from: Samsøn | 450 Harrison Ave. / 29 Thayer St. | Boston, MA 02118

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