Inside the yellow and blue house, the space comes alive through the everyday materials and stories scattered around the polished wooden floor. Objects such as cleaning supplies, rolling carts and trash bags are examples of how people associate with menial skills and worthless items. In Maude Kerns Art Center‘s latest exhibit “Day by Day,” the artists reflect on how the labors of gender roles are regarded as significant aspects of society.
Michael Fisher, the director of Maude Kerns, said every two years, he curates an exhibit based on local, regional and national artists’ submissions. Local artist Sarah Peterman, Portland artist Erika Rier and Austin, Texas artist Veronica Ceci all submitted pieces that were based on the “imagery of cleaning” and the historical value of functional objects. Fisher said it is interesting to see discarded items given a new light.
“I think what this show is just trying to do is bring the conversation of labor out,” Fisher said. “The exhibit looks at the stark difference of gender roles and what it has to do with these items. It is often the woman who takes on these sort of day-to-day tasks.”
According to a UNESCO 2022 gender equality report, women are underrepresented in the cultural workforce such as fine arts, gaming and music industries. In a global study in 2020, men are leaders of 58% of national arts councils while women have leadership opportunities in only 42%. In the field of art, white men have historically held the titles in the creative industries, leaving women, people of color and communities of diverse sexual orientation and identities with restrictive social inclusions in the art world institutions.
Ceci is hyper-aware of the inequalities in the art field and relates their struggles with the labor industry in her work. In Ceci’s pieces “FUtility II props,” and “Meet Curtain,” she embellishes gold leaves onto spray bottles, plungers and a toilet bowl brush to uplift everyday objects in a high culture context. In the museum’s program sheet, Ceci said everyone in society has value and it’s not about what you have but the willingness to survive and work hard.
Ceci describes in her pieces that people who live in luxury often overlook women’s labor positions. They are often not given the spotlight in the media and are undervalued for the toils of their job. Ceci even has a performance piece of herself on a video monitor where she is disguised in a housekeeper outfit. She uses the materials hung up on the wall to sanitize and scrub the floors of her gallery in Austin and to clean the outside of an airport window. Ceci said not one person acknowledged her during her performance.
As one turns left into a separate room, “folk surrealist” Erika Rier turns her drawings and paintings into a dream-like reality. In each of her pieces, she showcases an aspect of women performing their gendered roles through cleaning, cooking and picking flowers. The women are drawn in colorful patterns and shades. They are portrayed through the male gaze, an expectation for women to present themselves as beautiful and docile, Rier said.
Fisher said Rier likes to explore the female identity through a mythical lens. Fisher believes Rier’s art style is “self-taught” where she creates her own lore surrounding female homemakers. Rier uses her imagination to associate females with idolizing their duties.
“Rier is playing on female identity, communicating their roles through folklore and mythological stories,” Fisher said. “She adds a wonderful sort of bright, unique point of view that plays off nicely with the industrial functional pieces.”
In Rier’s piece “Forgotten History,” she displays a three-eyed humanoid doe in a long dress and another woman kneeling with long hair. Both characters in the scene are holding a knife and in the setting of a witch’s potion room. In the walls, eyeballs are watching the women’s every move, suggesting they must be obedient or they will be in trouble. Rier’s piece is reminiscent of a woman’s internal thoughts, fulfilling the gaze of admirers and completing their household preparations.
In Peterman’s work, she looks at “non-memorable” moments in a person’s life and exploits the waste of human habits. In her piece “Wool Bins,” she used discarded wool materials and spun them into giant blocks of lint. The lint is positioned by the artist to look like it is spilling out of the wooden hampers.
The task of doing laundry is a burden for women and a signal of endless responsibility, Peterman said. Although a piece of lint goes in the trash the minute one fishes it from the dryer, the material connects to the “highly gendered” functions of the household.
In this exhibit, the three artists explain that female-identified people are still treated unfairly in societies across the world. The space allows a conversation to be built around undoing the grasp of gender norms and the expectation to fill certain roles in their everyday activities, chores or professional path.
“Day by Day” is located at Maude Kerns Art Center at 1910 East 15th Avenue in Eugene. It is open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. The show will be on view until June 10.
The Henry Korn gallery in Maude Kerns Art Center presents several works from Sarah Peterman and Veronica Ceci. The Day by Day art exhibition at Maude Kerns Art Center showcases the work of Veronica Ceci, Sarah Peterman and Erika Rier. In this exhibit, these three artists reflect on the overlooked aspects of everyday life. (PaigeRodriguez/Emerald)
