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Art Review: Women’s Invitational XX/7

Lindsey Herkommer DeVries

With April’s Final Friday came the opening of FischHaus’s women’s invitational XX/7. Originally, the show began with the selection of five female artists, all Wichita-based.

From there, each artist selected the next, and then that artist selected the next, creating a curatorial structure of chance encounters.

Credit Lindsey Herkommer DeVries

Paris-based Dorthée Davoise fractures stone in her Untitled black and white collages of outcroppings, and crystallizes new geological forms - as if distilling memory - on a pristine white pages.

Credit Lindsey Herkommer DeVries

From Canada, Claire Greenshaw's works on paper are ghostly transfer drawings, giving us just a fleeting impression of fragmented bodies and commodities.

Credit Lindsey Herkommer DeVries

Seoul-born KU professor Yoonmi Nam has three perfectly replicate styrofoam to-go containers in plastic bags on heavy concrete pedestals. These barely-regarded everyday items are delicately made of paper and ceramic.

Credit Lindsey Herkommer DeVries

Israeli artist Merav Tzur’s interactive installation, SGRI Wichita Field Research Station had an assortment of items in petri dishes to be inspected with a handheld microscope and a notebook for scientific observations. It was actually more fun than I anticipated.

Credit Lindsey Herkommer DeVries

Based in Florida, Julie Ann Ward presented a video and stills from her The Last Independent Trucker. It records the narratives truckers shared with her during her ride alongs.

Finally, I have to take a moment to express my concern about the name of the biennial - XX - referring to the female chromosomes. This way of defining women and femininity via biology is outdated. Perhaps it was more in line with feminist thinking at the conception of the biennial 14 years ago, but contemporary feminist thought moves quickly and such a biologically-rooted name now feels like unfortunately packaging for a show that presents such a beautiful constellation of contemporary thought and making.