Opening Reception
6-8
pm –
January 11
-
February 25,
2018
Public
is
Welcome
!
When Virginia Woolf wrote
A Room of One’s Own,
a series of extended essays that she had given at two
British women’s colleges she explained her premise - “a
woman must have money and a room of one’s own if she is
to write fiction.”
She wrote this in 1929
following on the heels of the great novels where women
had principal roles but very little agency or bargaining
power other than their beauty. These female characters
created by men – Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina,
Grushenka in Dostoyevsky’s
The Idiot,
Balzac’s
La Cousin Bette,
or Zola’s
Nana
cross between re-enactments
of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden when woman tempts
man to his demise or a tragedies that result in the
death of the female, often at the hands of a jilted
lover. Too often when man said “yes”, he entered a
sphere where he was bound for ruin and when woman said
“no”, she was made to suffer. Virginia Woolf, once she
had her room, went on to write a body of work that added
unmitigated voices of female characters to the history
of literature.
“A
Studio of One’s Own”, the exhibition by Wanda Lock,
January 11 to February 25, 2018, opens on January 11
with a reception from 6 until 8 PM. This exhibition
demonstrates where a woman can go to when she has the
liberation of an open slate and place to work.
Lock works from a
large well-lit studio that is attached to her home in
Lake Country. She graduated from Emily Carr College of
Art and Design in 1992 and moved back to the Okanagan
soon after where she has pioneered her unique imagery
influenced by grunge music and coming-of-age movies. She
exhibits across Canada.
Her latest body of
multi-media works are based on the covers of harlequin
romance novels. Lock’s mother having been a fan of the
genre, she grew up with these idealized images of what a
woman could expect from romance. Just as Man and Woman
in cultural history was depicted from a variety of
perspectives now Lock has turned her gaze to the pulp
fiction rendition of the dance between man and woman
to make a statement,
objectifying the imagery and ‘having her way’ with it.
Her unabashed translation of muscled males and wilting
women turns the tides on cliché role playing.
Headbones introduces this new series from Wanda Lock
with earlier works where she used her son, then a young
teen, as a model. These large, accomplished, emotive
paintings of her offspring bring the fulfillment of
mothering into the visual arena. The result is as strong
and poignant as Dostoyevsky’s
War and Peace
– the novel that Woolf cited as being based on an
impossible subject for a woman writer for Woolf’s time,
a woman was not a soldier, her place was in the home and
that is where Woolf set her novels. It is interesting
that the woman artist of today creates works from the
relative banality of the home that commands the gallery
so absolutely. With a background rich in imagery
acknowledging the intellectual wealth of a woman’s
perspective, Wanda Lock rules.
Wanda Lock will be in
attendance at the reception at Headbones Gallery on
January 11, 2018, 6-8 PM. We hope you can join us.