Rubus Discolor Project is pleased to announce Heathers, a group exhibition featuring artists whose work shares an interest in notions of vanity, homage, connection, desire, beauty and frivolity. The artists prize the transition to womanhood and see it as a difficult but fertile time that is a source to draw from and celebrate. Working with painting, photography, and appropriated materials, their practices are united by concerns surrounding female stereotypes and the cultural expectations, pressures and contradictions they embody.
Amy Bay’s aggressively decorative work probes the subtle and not so subtle ways that “feminine” content is dismissed and quieted. Her heavily worked floral paintings use motifs and imagery that borrow from decorative arts, craft traditions, nostalgia, and discourses of politeness within our culture that have historically been framed as female.
In a departure from her constructed still life photography, Melanie Flood pulls photos from her personal archive to create an homage to a beloved friend, Sasha, whom she both adored and feared. Taken in the 1990’s during her teenage years while still learning her craft, Flood documented Sasha in the apartment she shared with her Mother, which felt like an extension of the girl herself. The photos represent a period of experimentation with drugs, problematic sexual encounters and aggression, but also a time of intimacy and sweetness. They are a testament to girlhood and all its complications.
The figures in Rainen Knecht’s paintings are at once seductive and discomfiting. Posing dutifully for the viewer, they upend any kind of objectifying gaze as they edge towards the feral. Drawn from fables, horror films, movie posters and folk costumes, Knecht’s worlds are imbued with otherworldliness that borders on tenderness. But there is also a sense that these girls will not be easily controlled.
Bobbi Woods' works document and reframe the popular idioms, brutal banalities, and nervous tensions between pleasure and hilarity, fear and desire. In this exhibition, spray painted movie posters complicate time as it relates to manufacture of desire. Something has happened or will happen—its format conjures unrequited allure. Energetic and unruly, austere or sarcastic, they try on different voices while inserting them into the predominantly masculine order of advertising, taunting language as form, material and visceral space.
Amy Bay holds a BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Winchester School of Art. She also completed the London-based Turps Banana Correspondence Course for painters. Bay has exhibited her work at Melanie Flood Projects, Portland, OR; UNA Gallery, Portland, OR; SNAG Gallery, Seattle; Peninsula Art Space, Brooklyn; The Painting Center, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; Printed Matter, New York; Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn; and The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx. She lives in Portland, OR and is represented by Melanie Flood Projects.
Melanie Flood holds a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York and an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice from Portland State University. Flood directs Melanie Flood Projects, a contemporary art space. Her work and projects have been featured in Art in America, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Zingmagazine, Photo District News, among others. Her work has been shown at Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR; Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR; Autzen Gallery, Portland, OR; Carl & Sloan Contemporary, Portland, OR. Flood is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary.
Rainen Knecht received her BFA in Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and has shown at Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR; SITUATIONS, New York; and CAPITAL, San Francisco; Fisher Parrish, Brooklyn; Stems Gallery, Brussels, BE; Royal Nonesuch Gallery, Oakland; Either Way, Los Angeles; and PMOMA, Portland, OR. Knecht is currently based in Portland, OR and is represented by Fourteen30.
Bobbi Woods studied photography at Columbia College Chicago, earned a BFA and an MFA from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena and studied at Staedelschule, Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Her work has been shown at Pepin Moore, Los Angeles; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; ASHES/ASHES, New York; Derek Eller, New York; Company, New York; White Columns, New York; David B.Smith, Denver; Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR; Almine Rech, Paris, France; MOCA Tuscon; Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain, Nice, France. Her work is in private collections and institutions nationally and internationally. Woods is also the founder and director of Private Places, an independent exhibition and project gallery in Portland, Oregon.