I’ve been a working artist, curator, community activist and teacher for more than 25 years, creating and producing intimate solo performances, large-scale public happenings, socially engaged interventions and performance art workshops and lectures. My practice extends across black boxes and white cubes, art fairs and subway stations, international festivals, and single bathroom stalls. I’ve operated an artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk, a soup kitchen for artists, a breast milk tasting bar, and a performance festival hub for kids. I’m forever inspired by the rebel queers, renegade witches, and other dyke moms I run with, and bound to many brilliant artists, activists, spell-casters and healers. For many years I made performances that drew from my own experiences of trauma and transformation, intimacy and motherhood. More recently, I’ve experienced a shift in my practice, where my attention has turned to wider theoretical questions about the nature of performance itself to ask questions about when, where, how we perform - in theatres and galleries, on social media, and in our everyday lives.
Guests are invited to celebrate the opening of the exhibition An Intimate Portrait of Motherhood with a reception on Tuesday, March 1 at 4:00 PM. Both the reception and the exhibition are free and open to the public.
This exhibition forces the viewer to confront the sensual, intimate nature of breastfeeding and the physical mother-child relationship. Through photography and video, these two artists use the lens to examine and cope with the physical, emotional and mental complexities of the mother’s body. Katie Doyle’s work gives the audience a vantage point so close they feel as if they’re seeing from inside her, while her son suckles and consumes milk or entangles his soft limbs in hers. Ogier-Bloomer’s photographs utilize a frank, unapologetic voice shared between image-maker and subject: whether she appears in the image with her daughter, her mother, or from behind the camera. Both artists examine this unique maternal communication based in touch—a language without words, rooted in biology and the senses.
Raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Anna Ogier-Bloomer holds an MFA in Photography & Related Media from Parsons School of Design, where she was awarded the Photography Department Prize in 2011. Shereceived her BFA from The School of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she was the recipient of the Yousuf Karsh Prize in Photography and a Dean's Travel Grant. Ogier-Bloomer has exhibited at galleries and museums nationally, including the Bridge Art Fair in Miami/Basel, The Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and at the Attleboro Arts Museum in Massachusetts. She has received grants from Chashama in New York, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and CSArts Cincinnati. Anna has been an adjunct Assistant Professor at the City University of New York. She currently lives in New York City and travels often for her work.
- See more at: http://www.wellesley.edu/event/node/81611#sthash.V6lNZjEu.dpufNew Maternalisms Redux is the third and last in the New Maternalisms exhibition series (following Toronto 2012 and Santiago 2014). It features five artists drawn from the first two exhibitions: Lenka Clayton, Jess Dobkin, Alejandra Herrera, Courtney Kessel, & Jill Miller. The work of these artists represents a spectrum of experience; it includes queer and straight identified mothers, single and partnered mothers, mothers of differently abled children, mothers of twins and singletons, and a represents range of race/class/economic privilege. This range of positionalities inflects the performance and project-based work presented here -- work that investigates the maternal iteratively, as a political and affective force. Considered individually and together, these works engage with one another and the public, drawing the community into important conversations around what it means to mother, as a non-reductive, thinking-feeling and political practice, today.
A three-day colloquium, Mapping the Maternal: Art, Ethics, and the Anthropocene, is being held in conjunction with the exhibition, with participants drawn from the most prominent voices on feminist art and the maternal today. The keynote presentation is being delivered by internationally recognized feminist theorist and art historian, Dr. Griselda Pollock. This colloquium, open to the public, brings crucial thinking on the anthropocene and anthropogenic climate change together with thinking on the maternal as metaphor, practice, and politics. Accompanying the exhibition there will be a film screening at Edmonton’s Metro Cinema at the Garneau Theater (3:30 pm on May 13th). The screening features two shorts, Sheena Wilson’s PetroMama and Gina Miller’s Family Tissues, and a full-length screening of Irene Lusztig’s award-winning The Motherhood Archives.