Carly Smallbird
American, b. 1980sGender 2022
Living artist, wool, cotton, polyester, spectacles, found objects
When working with found materials, pieces often evoke the question of how context and juxtaposition change the narrative around the materials (c.f. Duchamp's Fountain). Viewers are challenged with evaluating materials from new perspectives, and considering new potential for them. Here, gender is removed from its primary heterosocial context apart from what the viewer brings with them, to be considered by its composition only.
The artist prompts the viewer to consider gender as a context itself, but one that can be significantly transformed in presentation and action—utilizing a melange of lesbian signifiers (flannel, button-downs, utilitarian objects—themselves transformed in combination with western womanhood), the overtly feminine (long hair, the color pink, skirts, botanical prints), and things society genders masculine (electronics, engineering, "men's" colognes). The latter category is transformed itself when one considers how expression, presentation, and communication are concepts often coded feminine in the western mind. While none of the component materials have been changed, the process of presentation together makes them more than the sum of their parts, and a transgression from their expected purposes.
