Anita Enriquez
Systems of Romance
September 7th, 2024 – 27th, 2024
Hours: Wednesday, Thursday & Saturday, 1pm – 7pm
or by appointment (626) 201-1174
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 7th, 2024, 5pm – 9pm
She/They Gallery
Santora Arts Building
207 N. Broadway Suite L
Santa Ana, CA 92701
In the exhibition Systems of Romance Anita Enriquez asks us to reconsider the classical ideals of purity and permanence. Through sculpture and performance, the artist remakes and re-stages aspects of contemporary life where these classical ideals are imbedded but invisible and pushes them to the point of logical fallacy – logico ad absurdism – and the social veneer falls away so we can see them for the fictions they are.
The artist says “My work is based on awkwardness and absurdity. On things we take for granted as necessary, even desirable, but if we had an objective view of them we would have a good laugh at ourselves. I create extravagant, functionless gestures through sculpture or by playing the fool. Folly is a female allegory and my preference is to explore these themes through the lesser-known histories of women and the spaces they occupied.”
This brand of absurdist feminism borrows heavily from the experimental art tradition where failure is embraced for the fact that it can often lead to more productive avenues of inquiry than the quest for perfection.
Systems of Romance is Enriquez’s first solo exhibition at She/They Gallery and is comprised of videos and photographs made both for the camera and as documentation of performance work, as well as soft sculptures from her Folly series.
Anita Enriquez is a Los Angeles artist graduated from Cranbrook Academy of Art with an MFA in Fibers. After working professionally as a decorative painter she attended CSU Long Beach for her BFA, then the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for a Post-baccalaureate where she took up needle and thread. She had a four month residency in Santa Monica CA where she turned a defunct storefront into a showroom for artists. She has also participated in two festivals with FEMMEBIT including Maiden LA. Enriquez won the Director’s Award and the Mercedes-Benz New Beginnings Award at Cranbrook, and the Marshall Frankel Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center.
For more information please visit: https://www.anitaenriquez.com
