March  24, 2009

To my eye, Tory Wright’s durotrans cutouts are the most beguiling pieces in the show at Civilian Art Projects that opened Friday night and that features the work of four female artists for Women’s History Month. I’ll talk about them in a bit. Meanwhile, let me get this digression out of the way up front: can we talk about Women’s History Month? The older I get, the more irritated I grow about ghettoization, balkanization, categorization, classification, typification and otherwise creating groups according to some immutable characteristic of birth. I just read today that the government will no longer require schools to identify students as black, white, non-white Hispanic,  Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, etc. We are now officially permitted to check all the boxes we want. The primary opposition to acceptance of the obvious reality of what we see all around us apparently comes from the educational industrial complex, which needs to demonstrate numerical progress in each individual arbitrary ethnic category and pigmentation tint in order to satisfy the No Child Left Behind regulations. Talk about the tail wagging the dog.

Jayme, my friend at Civilian, please don’t think for a moment that I hold you responsible for the source of my grumpy digression – on the contrary, you’ve got a rewarding show up, so let’s turn to art.

Tory Wright's work

Hadieh Shafie's work

Hadieh Shafie