ROCK CANDY

CURATED BY MADELEINE BIALKE AND ALI ROSSI

March 3 - 9, 2020

Featuring: Anna Berlin, Maggie King, Alyssa Klauer, Aliza Sternstein

The shift from girlhood to woman is excessive. An all-pervasive culture of slimness and celebration of restraint directly contradicts the rapid expansion of breasts and curves. In the 1990s well into the early 2000s, trials of puberty and common body types were blatantly contradicted by emancipated models in magazines like Nylon, Playboy, and Vogue. Skeletal collar bones jutted out to the masses. Dieting—rampant and encouraged. Historically, femininity equated to taking up as little space as possible; not being too loud, performative restraint. But while mass media perpetuated shrinking and silence, color exploded in surplus as young women sought a distinguished and individualized sense of self. Claire’s Boutique was the destination for exploration. Girlhood was marked by polly-pockets, glitter, sticker books, bracelets, and bubble letters. 

Coming of age stories narrated by young girls are gaining prevalence and contributing variation to the excess of boy-evolves-into-man Pokémon redundancy. Yet, even when girlhood is championed, it's often in the form of borrowed or acquired masculinity, like America's historic and beloved "To Kill a Mockingbird," and the tomboy character of Scout, or Kim Possible, and anyone who is "not like other girls." The girly-girls in these stories are usually side-kicks, or enemies; frivolous, dumb-blonde types with "misplaced priorities" and unrealistic expectations of love and dreams. Silent is the story of performative-as-feminine achievement. 

Aliza Sternstein celebrates clichéd heart symbols by combining them with the elegance and gravitas of gestural abstraction. These hearts shimmer and vibrate on the canvas like remembered dreams, as if dredged up from childhood through the elastic and eloquent mind of an adult. Anna Berlin creates canvases as miniature worlds, investigating notions of play and purpose. Here, scale is warped and relatively small shapes become expansive in comparison to the miniature. Berlin boldly signs her canvases on the surface, a sighting of confidence not tied to masculinity. With the colors of DIY tie-dye parties, Alyssa Klauer paints a narrative of growing up steeped in fantasy, candy wrappers, and Adobe Elements filters. Figures distort and become disembodied, abandoned in the lure of texture. Maggie King combines this ethos with the primitive, seductive surfaces filled with close color relationships that build a sense of eerie light. Beauty, often suspect culturally, is celebrated here as empowering. 

Rock Candy creates a space where the quotidian internal dialogue of feminine identity and experience percolates into a display of power. The works by these four artists build layered meaning to low girlhood culture and place it in step with the universal themes that dog every other story of transformation.