Artwork > HEAVY SHINE

With #metoo at our tongue tips and the riot grrrrrl aesthetic of pussyhats fresh in our memory, feminist critiques of cultural and artistic production are emerging rapidly, even violently. While many of these remain either beholden to outdated ideology or naïve imagery, Robyn LeRoy-Evans and Dianne Lee harness and complicate the clichés of their disciplines, necessarily interrogating their identity as women making together.

Looking to matrilineal craft traditions, narrative vessels, and personal history, HEAVY SHINE reflects the rigor and vulnerability of collaborative work. Balancing artistic risk with trust, precise workwomanship with spontaneous assemblage, and personal friendship with artistic work, LeRoy-Evans and Lee leave behind a shifting and fragile archive. Crafted over a period of several months, few visits, and many thousands of miles, this exhibition was curated and assembled mindfully and collaboratively, and the material will continue to be mined as the artists’ relationship shifts and changes, resulting in a living document, capable of being remixed and reworked.

In HEAVY SHINE viewers can expect to encounter an initial traditional artistic vocabulary of ceramic vessels, still lifes, portraiture, and arranged tableaus. Within their collaborative practice, Robyn and Dianne investigate their relationship with the artistic canon, their materials of choice, and one another. A collection of multimedia artworks situate craft (and the work of women) within a self-reflective feminist critique.

HEAVY SHINE orients the artists’ respective mediums and interdisciplinary collaborations in reciprocal transformation, hinting at the intimacy and knowledge gained in material experimentation and relational practice.

M.C. Baumstark, Guest Curator of HEAVY SHINE, The Front, 2019