Backyard Ghost

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Backyard Ghost is pleased to present ‘Shifting the Mind to Tender’, an online solo exhibition by Amanda Joy Calobrisi. 

 

Calobrisi’s recent body of work which encompasses painting, drawing and sculpture is an objection to the long history of female objectification in the visual arts as well as a recapitulation of the stories of womanhood from a protagonist’s internal voice. 

 

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I can render the women affectionately and with camaraderie rather than objectively, and compose through an experience of our bodies from the inside.   - Amanda Joy Calobrisi

 

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The black and white photographs in which Calobrisi refers to were taken by an amateur Parisian photographer who called himself Monsieur X, who worked in the period between WW1 and WW2. During this time, he created 100’s of idiosyncratic and fetishistic images for his own pleasure. Looking at these erotic images of young women Calobrisi finds the lyrical, the theatrical and the playful and makes it political. There is “always something familiar in the pictures” and she “empathizes with the ridiculousness of the positions that we are put in as women in a man’s world”.

 

Working through multiple forms, mediums and scales Calobrisi attempts to collapse the boundary that the camera creates between the viewer and the image and “to disappear the man’s camera all together”. In this new position, the protagonists can unfold their desires, joy, and pleasure in exposing one’s own body to illuminate and celebrate their sexuality. 

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The works presented in ‘Shifting the Mind to Tender’ are sensual, psychological and inhabited by the artist’s distinctive feminist archetypes. The drawings are rendered with uninhibited and carefree marks, the approach both reckless and tender at the same time. The painted forms reveal themselves through heightened color, loose pattern, and uncouth texture. Copious tangled marks made with brush or pencil, caress the interior and exterior of the figures allowing them to exist in a field of constant motion despite the persistent stillness innate to painting and drawing. As if they are taking a self-portrait rather than posing for an artist, the figures in Calobrisi’s work shift from impersonal fantasy to jubilant corporeality that simply carries agency, self-love, and invulnerability.