Andrea Geyer, Three Chants Modern,
Production Still from Video Installation (with performer Niv Acosta), 2013
A Space Gallery and Images Festival presents,
Sound Giving Will Feeling
(an insistent entity reached)
Andrea Geyer
Essay by Vivian Ziherl
Exhibition runs April 13 – May 25, 2013
Opening Reception Saturday April 13th, 2 – 4 PM
Artist Talk with Andrea Geyer: Friday April 12th at 3 PM in the Images Hub,
Urban Space Gallery, 401 Richmond Street West, Ground Floor, Toronto
The Images Festival runs from April 11 – 20, 2013. www.imagesfestival.com
The New York City-based artist Andrea Geyer will present a group of new works developed from her research on the repressed, yet insistently present history of women in the development of the early Modernist project. Drawings, diagrams and videos allow viewers to reflect on the influential work done by these early Modernists. For example, 50 of 300 artists in the groundbreaking 1913 Armory show were women, as were many funders of the show. Abby Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Sullivan (MoMA), Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Hilla Rebay (Guggenheim), Helen Clay Frick and Katherine S. Dreier (Société Anonyme) founded the institutional pillars of Modernism in New York City. Women wrote, painted, curated, organized, drew, danced, sang, protested and raised money. The financially fluent supported those with a cause. They met in salons, exhibitions, on boats out on the Atlantic, in speakeasies, at dinner tables, in bars and on the street. It was their work that allied them across class separations and cultural backgrounds. Futurism, political reform, feminism, cubism, birth control, blues and women’s suffrage linked them inextricably together in one of the most exciting and creative moments of the 20th century. Yet Geyer’s new works don’t simply offer a revisionist history of the Modernist project. They also insist that the tireless work, spirit and convictions that drove these women to create a cross-pollinating and far-reaching network across art, politics, education and social reform remains present wherever we closely look today. Her works invite us to rethink time, to liberate it from ideologically framed histories and discover it as a radical non-linear presence and source of potential that continuously surrounds us.
