"Hinge Pictures: Eight Women Artists Occupy the Third Dimension" | Group Exhibition

Hinge Pictures: Eight Women Artists Occupy the Third Dimension is an exhibition in eight-parts, a confrontation with the patrimony of European modernism in the practices of eight leading women artists: Sarah Crowner, Julia Dault, Leslie Hewitt, Tomashi Jackson, Erin Shirreff, Ulla von Brandenburg, Adriana Varejão, and Claudia Wieser.

Across eight successive galleries, this exhibition presents practices that evolve from the flat plane of the wall to immersive sculptural environments. Staging a performance of material history, spatial occupation, and social positioning, Hinge Pictures: Eight Women Artists Occupy the Third Dimension resuscitates abstract modernist vocabularies, marked by patriarchal and colonial histories, for use in a new feminist formalism.

Hinge Pictures: Eight Women Artists Occupy the Third Dimension takes its name from the writings of Marcel Duchamp in The Green Box, a companion piece to his masterwork The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (La Mariée mise a nu par ses célibataires, même, more commonly known as Le Grande Verre or The Large Glass). The Large Glass is a work in glass, paint, wire, and foil. In the most literal reading, it figures a nude woman, suspended above a host of ogling bachelors. In his writing, Duchamp narrates both social and physical constraint ("The Bride accepts this stripping...") and formal liberation ("discover true form...develop the principle of the hinge..."). The artists of Hinge Pictures: Eight Women Artists Occupy the Third Dimension use formal constraint--a commitment to abstraction--in a demonstration of social liberation; theirs is a knowing, deconstructed rehearsal of form and color, weighted by the errors, limits, and categorical proscriptions of transatlantic Modernism. The exhibition includes many large-scale new commissions.