Photographs by Brittney Cathey-Adams and Arielle Bobb-Willis
Curated by Roula Seikaly and Jon Feinstein
May 2 – June 2, 2019
In the early 1970s, art critic John Berger and film theorist Laura Mulvey called out a hovering ghost. In naming the “male gaze,” their analysis opened a fulsome critical space to discuss how women are portrayed in visual art and film. The critique informed the work of art historians such as Griselda Pollock and Linda Nochlin, who analyzed milestone paintings in the western canon for constructions of women as commodities ripe for male consumption and control. In the early 2000s, bell hooks necessarily complicated the discussion by articulating the “oppositional gaze.” Through this critical lens, hooks suggests that the absence of black women across visual media motivates resistance among those who are subject to wholescale erasure.
In the decades since Berger, Mulvey and hooks’ ideas took form, numerous exhibitions designed to flip the male gaze and propose a countering “female gaze” have been staged. Google it and you will see: “Women photographing women.” “Women photographing men.” Essentially, an attempt to reclaim power by inverting the existing structure. It’s a winding and challenging path that may not resolve the original problem, but acknowledges both the cultural complexity and empowerment that may come from looking and being looked at.
An Inward Gaze, instead, is an abstraction of control and self representation. Rather than offering a salve for the many complex problems tied to the male gaze, we’ve paired the work of Arielle Bobb-Willis and Brittney Cathey-Adams in an attempt to reframe looking: how two artists use photography to process their own inner struggles, how they use images of the physical form as metaphors for these monologues, and ultimately, how their methods are a means of taking ownership over their bodies and inward spaces.
Brittney Cathey-Adams’ monumental black and white self portraits were born of the artist’s desire to embrace her physical form, to treat herself with respect instead of shame. The images resonate as a rejection of both intense cultural pressure to maintain the “right” (read: thin) body and numerous photographic representations of the female nude in a natural setting. Though simple in their choreography, her portraits convey dense psychological meaning: Vortex, which locates the artist in a body of water, registers grace and the physical lightness that comes when gravity’s pull is momentarily escaped. Carried forward, that sensorial relief could symbolize a moment’s respite from the perpetual feedback loop of body shaming and “health policing” to which average and fat-bodied people are relentlessly subject. This and many of Cathey-Adams’ water compositions call to mind Harry Callahan’s portraits of his wife Eleanor, and capture both love and compassion for the photographic subject at a vulnerable moment. Alternately, Cathey-Adams’ compositions gesture to something uncontrollable, perhaps dangerous, in nature and the womanly form. Enigma, majestic for its backlit composition and a form that occupies space unapologetically, suggests a feral encounter with nature. Similar to work by the late artist Laura Aguilar (1959-2018), Cathey-Adams inserts herself without asking permission, interrupting pat interpretations of the landscape and assumptions of what fat bodies are capable of.
Arielle Bobb-Willis makes wild, colorful images of friends and collaborators dressed in wild, colorful clothing. Often photographing multiple people at once, their bodies twist, contort, conjoin, become one – their outfits often obscuring their faces. Occasionally Bobb-Willis rotates an image sideways or 180 degrees, turning bodies into otherworldly planks, or making them appear suspended from above. For the artist, these images represent her own struggle with depression. The knots, highs, lows and feelings of multidirectional emotional pull. The many complex clashing colors that describe imbalance. But what does this have to do with the historic gaze? It’s all about control. While the artist rarely, if ever, photographs herself, her work could be considered self portraiture. Models are stand-ins for her own struggles, hosts for her to claim the demons dancing about. While the male gaze is all about power through looking, Bobb-Willis’ photos are a rainbow-clad reclamation, an unexpectedly playful inverse.
Neither photographer answers any concrete questions about a grand female vision. Nor do they create a solution to visual legacies that have shaped centuries of looking. Asking the world to simply undo the male gaze is not as easy as it seems. Sex and gender are complicated, loaded with experience, culture, class and limitless other factors. Instead, what unites Arielle Bobb-Willis and Brittney Cathey-Adams’ work is the process of taking control, pulling apart and reconfiguring oneself on one’s own terms.
– Roula Seikaly and Jon Feinstein, curators
Curators
Jon Feinstein is a Seattle and New York City-based photographer, curator, writer, and co-founder of Humble Arts Foundation. Jon has curated numerous exhibitions over the last decade in venues including Glassbox Gallery in Seattle, The Filter Photo Festival in Chicago, Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle, Hasted Kraeutler in NYC, Affirmation Arts in NYC, Barclays Arena in Brooklyn, New York, and Milk Studios in NYC. His curatorial projects have been featured in Aperture, The New York Times, The New Republic, BBC, VICE, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, Feature Shoot, and American Photo, and his writing has appeared in VICE, TIME, Slate, GOOD, Daylight, Photograph, and PDN.
Roula Seikaly is a writer and independent curator based in Berkeley, and Humble Arts Foundation’s Senior Editor. Her writing is featured on platforms including Aperture, Photograph, Saint Lucy, Strange Fire Collective, Camerawork, Hyperallergic, and KQED Arts. She has curated exhibitions at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, SOMArts, and SF Camerawork.
Artists
Born and raised in New York City, with pit stops in South Carolina and New Orleans, photographer Arielle Bobb-Willis has been using the camera for nearly a decade as a tool of empowerment. Battling with depression from an early age, Bobb-Willis found solace behind the lens and has developed a visual language that speaks to the complexities of life: the beautiful, the strange, belonging, isolation, and connection. Her photographs are all captured in urban and rural cities, from the South to North, East to West. Bobb-Willis travels throughout the US as a way of finding “home” in any grassy knoll, or city sidewalk, reminding us to stay connected and grounded during life’s transitional moments. She is currently based in New York City.
Brittney Cathey-Adams is a photographic artist currently located in Portland, Oregon. Her work includes themes of body politics, fat positivity, and interrogating ideas of representation through self-portraiture. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as the de Young Museum, The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado, and Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco. Most recently, she was a 2017 Artist In Residence with Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York. Previously, she taught photography and created program curricula in the Bay Area for seven years. She is currently teaching photography with Portland Community College. With a strong passion for photography and art education, Cathey-Adams dedicates herself to image making as well as sharing visual language through teaching in and out of the classroom.
