WOMEN TO WATCH 2015: Organic Matters

Organic Matters was the fourth installment of Women to Watch, with a focus on artists who work with nature as their subject. The connection between women and nature has a long, fraught history, colored by gendered stereotypes and discriminatory assumptions.  The artists featured in the exhibition confronted and expanded upon these concepts, producing works that ranged from the fanciful to the frightening, the realistic to the abstract. The resulting show looked at modern society’s relationship to the environment, using a diverse array of media.

Selected Artist

Goldschmied & Chiari
Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari are artists from Italy, working with varied media: photography, video, performance and installations. An artistic duo since 2001, they both live and work in Milan. Their art highlights a need to go beyond the limits of nature and history, to inquire about the cultural, social, and visual construction of gender and landscape.

“Nympheas #12” (2007), a photograph of an arrangement created by fishing plastic bags out of the Tiber River and rearranging the litter to evoke Monet’s water lilies, was chosen for the Women to Watch exhibition. In the photograph, the bags look more like flowers than garbage.