Art Windsor-Essex respectfully acknowledges that we are located on Anishinaabe Territory – the traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, comprised of the Ojibway, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi. Today the Anishinaabe of the Three Fires Confederacy are represented by Bkejwanong. We want to state our respect for the ancestral and ongoing authority of Walpole Island First Nation over its Territory.
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Hysteria and the Body
March 29, 2008 - July 15, 2008
AWE Gallery
In the late nineteenth century, the burgeoning fields of psychology and psychiatry paid increasing attention to hysteria, a functional disturbance of the nervous system which they deemed a “female malady.” Yet since the 1970s, many contemporary women artists – and some male artists – have mimicked hysteria as an act of resistance to traditional gender roles.
Hysteria and the Body focuses on artworks from the 1970s through the 1990s, mainly by women artists, in its investigation of representations of the body, gender and identity. Including sculpture, video, artist books, printmaking, drawing and photography, the exhibition disrupts conventional ways of viewing the body and our preconecptions of “normal” behaviour.
Important artists from Canada and around the world are featured in this exhibition, including, Vito Acconci (USA), Cindy Sherman (USA), Louise Bourgeois (France), Jana Sterbak (Canada), Marina Abramovic (Serbia), and Pipilotti Rist (Switzerland). The exhibition explores widely shared themes, for example, aging and motherhood, and more specific issues associated with indvidual identity.
