Confronting the Canvas: Women of Abstraction
introduces Jacksonville audiences to six women painting in New York today. As a public program of MOCA Jacksonville's exhibition, the screening of Our City Dreams on August 18 presents five more artists who call New York home.
Filmed over the course of two years, Our City Dreams visits the creative spaces of five women, documents their many triumphs and challenges, and provides a glimpse into the processes of creation and inspiration.
Marina Abramovic
is a pioneer of performance art who uses her own body as a canvas to respond deeply to contemporary cultural issues. The film captures Abramovic's weeklong series of performances at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Ghada Amer
paints erotic canvases in traditional needle and thread, refusing to bow to the puritanical elements of Western and Islamic culture and "institutionalized feminism.” The movie documents her return to Egypt.
Kiki Smith
addresses philosophical, social, and spiritual aspects of the human body through work that incorporates glass, plaster, ceramic, bronze, and paper. Viewers follow her traveling retrospective, Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005, which culminated at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2006.
Nancy Spero
was at the forefront of the feminist movement of the late 50s and 60s and continued to question the polemics of sexual identity and warfare until she died in 2009. In the film, Spero prepares a new piece for the 2007 Venice Biennale.
Swoon
, one of New York's most promising emerging artists, transmits the pulse of urban life with her arresting and fugitive street art. The film shows her first solo exhibition at Deitch Projects in New York. Swoon's work also appeared in The Other: Nurturing a New Ecology in Printmaking in the UNF Gallery MOCA Jacksonville.