Katherine Sherwood
Red Robe
2020
Paint on reclaimed canvases
98” x 62”
$18,000
Website: http://katherinesherwood.com
California, USA
VO by Mari Weiss
2020
Paint on reclaimed canvases
98” x 62”
$18,000
Website: http://katherinesherwood.com
California, USA
VO by Mari Weiss
ABOUT THE ARTWORK:
"Venuses of the Yelling Clinic" is a series of large-scale paintings featuring disabled reclining female nudes that reference medical imagery and disability. They appropriate art-historical images of the female nude in order to challenge canonical ideals of beauty. They are painted on the cotton backs of art history reproductions made in the 1950s and 1960s. The images on the reproduction prints are primarily Western paintings and drawings. The cotton backs are quite beautiful. They have handwritten labels with the artists’ names and catalogue numbers, are a bit yellowed, and show evidence of repeated use. The reproductions are tiled together with linen strips to create a large, quilted, painting surface.
BIO:
Sherwood’s work addresses intersectionality, feminism, and art history through the lens of disability. Her life and art completely changed when she had a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 44, which paralyzed the entire right side of her body. After a period of recovery, she returned to painting with a newfound vitality. Forced to relearn to paint with her left hand, she discovered that she “became a more fluid and urgent left-handed painter,” and adopted a more gestural painting style by working flat and pouring paint directly onto her canvases.
Sherwood began her career in the ’80s, creating figurative feminist paintings while living in the East Village, New York. Returning to the Bay Area in the ’90s, she began painting abstractly in a highly conceptual style, referencing the medieval manuscript "The Lemegeton", brain imagery from the 19th and 20th centuries, theories of the holographic paradigm, and CIA satellite images of Russian nuclear test sites. She continued to explore these themes in her work post-stroke, referencing medieval seals of leaders such as King Solomon and Koran and collaging photo-lithographs of her own brain’s arterial paths. As she redeveloped her approach to painting, her work became an extension of her activism for disability rights. The "Healers of the Yelling Clinic", a series of constructed figure paintings made with textiles and brain-scan heads which she began in 2010, allude to the Yelling Clinic, a collective co-founded by Sherwood and artist Sunaura Taylor. Their goal was to foster awareness and begin a dialog on disability and art therapy, particularly the causality between war and disability. A subsequent series of Venuses challenge the limited scope of inclusivity and feminism in art history. Appropriations of odalisques are adorned with elaborate crowns atop of heads made of collaged brains, all with different skin tones and signifiers of disability such as canes and prosthetics. They are painted on the backs of reproductions of classical paintings, formerly used as instructional aids at UC Berkeley. Most recently, Sherwood has been developing a series she calls Brain Flowers, exploring the transient nature of existence. These still lives, made on the same recycled reproductions, are based on post-Impressionist and 17th century Dutch flower paintings and incorporate the artist’s own fMRI scans as flowers.
Sherwood began her career in the ’80s, creating figurative feminist paintings while living in the East Village, New York. Returning to the Bay Area in the ’90s, she began painting abstractly in a highly conceptual style, referencing the medieval manuscript "The Lemegeton", brain imagery from the 19th and 20th centuries, theories of the holographic paradigm, and CIA satellite images of Russian nuclear test sites. She continued to explore these themes in her work post-stroke, referencing medieval seals of leaders such as King Solomon and Koran and collaging photo-lithographs of her own brain’s arterial paths. As she redeveloped her approach to painting, her work became an extension of her activism for disability rights. The "Healers of the Yelling Clinic", a series of constructed figure paintings made with textiles and brain-scan heads which she began in 2010, allude to the Yelling Clinic, a collective co-founded by Sherwood and artist Sunaura Taylor. Their goal was to foster awareness and begin a dialog on disability and art therapy, particularly the causality between war and disability. A subsequent series of Venuses challenge the limited scope of inclusivity and feminism in art history. Appropriations of odalisques are adorned with elaborate crowns atop of heads made of collaged brains, all with different skin tones and signifiers of disability such as canes and prosthetics. They are painted on the backs of reproductions of classical paintings, formerly used as instructional aids at UC Berkeley. Most recently, Sherwood has been developing a series she calls Brain Flowers, exploring the transient nature of existence. These still lives, made on the same recycled reproductions, are based on post-Impressionist and 17th century Dutch flower paintings and incorporate the artist’s own fMRI scans as flowers.
DESCRIPTION:
Red Robe
A naked woman with her back to us stands with a red garment held in both hands in front of her. She has a tan complexion, curly blonde hair that falls between her shoulder blades. The hair is made up of brain scan imagery. A small portion of her right cheek is white. She is barefoot and wears a black below-the-knee prosthesis on her right leg. She faces a wide black panel. The floor is a zig-zag pattern of wide bands of white and blue with thinner bands of red and yellow.
-description by Teri Grossman
A naked woman with her back to us stands with a red garment held in both hands in front of her. She has a tan complexion, curly blonde hair that falls between her shoulder blades. The hair is made up of brain scan imagery. A small portion of her right cheek is white. She is barefoot and wears a black below-the-knee prosthesis on her right leg. She faces a wide black panel. The floor is a zig-zag pattern of wide bands of white and blue with thinner bands of red and yellow.
-description by Teri Grossman
Opulent Mobility by A. Laura Brody is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
The Opulent Mobility license refers to the exhibit and its audio descriptions. Individual artworks are the property of the individual artists.