“5 Women” installation view. Photo: Francisco Ramos
The title for the current exhibition at F gallery in Houston, 5 Women, is, full disclosure, something I discussed with multiple artists included in the show before its opening (fullest disclosure: I am close friends and colleagues with most of the artists in 5 Women. I have not, however, discussed my thoughts in this review or that I’m even writing it with anyone in the show). The title is provocative, especially for an exhibition staged in Houston, where the consideration of identity in the city’s multiple, overlapping art worlds is often overtly focused on race and intersectionality. F’s Adam Marnie complicates the title somewhat in the exhibition’s brief press release, describing the group as “five of Houston’s most influential artists” and the show as proposing “a horizontal and ongoing model of reciprocal influence based on affiliation, place, and time.”
“5 Women” installation view. Photo: Francisco Ramos
As the press release suggests, F is rigorously and unabashedly relational in its ongoing curatorial project. Like the artists in 5 Women, I am cis, white, in my 50s (for all of eight days now!), live in Houston, and because of my close ties with some of the artists and the particularities of my training as an artist, I have myriad ways of relating to the works in the show. In affinity not just with the artists but with F’s ethos, I am publishing my ideas about 5 Women in the hopes they will allow others to find and appreciate the work, as well. I am also interested in the provocation of the title, and in the ways the work in the exhibition talks back to it.
Francesca Fuchs, “Self-portrait as a boy,” 2024, acrylic on canvas over wood panel, 19 1/2 x 15 1/2 inches. Photo: Francisco Ramos
Amy Blakemore, “Stump,” 2012, chromogenic print, 12 x 12 inches, Edition 1/10. Photo: Francisco Ramos
Francesca Fuchs’ painting, Self Portrait as a Boy (2024) presents a sweetly awkward young version of the artist, a person brought forth years later with a gentle hand and palette. In our current time, when the flexibility of gender is on the table in a way it wasn’t when Fuchs was young, the artist compassionately looks back at herself with ambiguity. She makes space for confusion, highlighting the way a feminism built on fixed categories has been destabilized in just a couple of generations. Across the room, Amy Blakemore’s Stump (2012) is a photo that’s straightforward to the point of banality. On close inspection, I realized the gnarly cross section is from a palm tree, so there aren’t rings, but rather evidence of the palm’s vascular tissue — the latter looking like the end of double-walled cardboard. This stump won’t tell us the time, the way that the rings of, say, an oak tree give us its age and, often, data on our changing climate. This dead palm says “Fuck off, no more data!” The inscrutable non-built world peers over at Fuchs as a boy. I imagine looking at these two works with J.K. Rowling, who is, not incidentally, the same generation as our five women, and whose complete inflexibility around self and the terms of feminism are a despicable backlash against humans demanding bodily autonomy.
Katrina Moorhead, “Finisterre,” 2024 [detail], peat, walnut, brass, Duvetyne, thread, 43 3/4 x 77 1/4 x 7 inches. Photo: Francisco Ramos
On left, Amy Blakemore, “Stump,” 2012, chromogenic print, 12 x 12 inches, 20 5/8 x 20 5/8 inches framed, Edition 1/10. On right, Jillian Conrad, “Anchorite,” 2024, Styrofoam, cement, spray-paint, embossing powder, dust, rosin, 46 1/2 x 49 x 32 1/2 inches. Photo: Francisco Ramos
Katrina Moorhead’s Finisterre (2024), is a proposition for restraint as resistance. This embellished shelf made from walnut is held up by a stack of peat bricks. Dangling down from the right end of the shelf, which unexpectedly angles up, is a kind of pom pom or flogger made out of strips of fire-retardant fabric. Houston, a different kind of “end of the earth” than Finisterre, Spain, is intimately connected to carbon emissions. Moorhead’s work suggests that the renewal ceremonies of pilgrims setting fire to their clothing cannot be scaled up. Indeed, there is very good reason not to burn [our non-renewable resources]. Jillian Conrad’s Anchorite (2024) is hewn from what looks to be a big block of old-school Styrofoam, heavily spackled with cement in selected areas and lightly dusted with bright pigments in others. The result is a “boulder-type” object that brings up the idea of the unbuilt world while never letting me forget it is made of destructive construction materials that are ruining our lives. Its swaggering unsustainability shrugs away any idealization of present-day feminist work, of the fantasy that there is a “kinder sex” poised to save the planet from ecological disaster. The sculpture’s title brings up the idea of a secluded devotee, a figure who Christians relied upon to enact the religion’s ideals. In the context of 5 Women, I relish Anchorite as an object that refuses projection. It is not ideal! It will not be your ideal!
Dana Frankfort, “Not again!,” 2024, oil on canvas over panel, 60 x 72 inches. Photo: Francisco Ramos
Which brings me to Not again! (2024) by Dana Frankfort, a piece well within the artist’s oeuvre of words and phrases lusciously painted, overpainted, and painted again. The phrase “not again!” rings with performative exasperation; perhaps in response to Frankfort’s work being included in another show organized around gender. This is funny, obviously, especially when I consider the loud, “pick me” colors in Frankfort’s palette. Her paintings animate utterances in a very particular way; the artist writing and reading while pushing and pulling paint on a surface is undeniably corporeal. Not again! offers an ironic rallying cry to 5 Women — the show and its title — rooted in bodily presence, careful looking, and a mature understanding of how the world approaches each human and her universe.
Anna Mayer is an artist based in Houston, currently living in Galveston as part of the Galveston Artist Residency.
5 Women is on view at F, in Houston through November 3.
