Female Sensibility shows a lot of sense. Featuring works by LA-based artist Kirsten Stoltmann and NY-based Jennifer Sullivan, the exhibition highlights the difficulties of existing within gendered expectations and constraints, especially as a ‘woman artist.’ Though the topic could easily take itself too seriously, the work confronts the ideas with playfulness and self-awareness, achieving that elusive ideal of being both funny and thought-provoking (think Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette).

The artists do not shy away from anger or frustration: the centerpiece of the show, Stoltmann’s mixed-media interpretation of meditation, is an awkwardly folded mannequin on a carpet patterned with angrily repeating ‘fuck’s. As gallerist Emma Gray explains, it encapsulates the challenges of the meditation process, including the realization of just “how fucked up” our minds are when we try to discover inner peace.

Courtesy of Five Car Garage

Stoltmann’s “Vulnerability is a bitch,” the phrase emblazoned over collaged swingers’ ads, essentially speaks for itself – drolly revealing the universality of our deepest emotions and needs. Looking closer at the ads in the piece, I was struck by how easily and quickly we are all reduced to numbers and categories: “32, 5’9, 135 lbs.” “Bi WC.” “SWM.” Like the rest of the show, it deals with the immediacy between individual and universal experiences.

Sullivan’s series of paintings of Courtney Love rounds off the exhibition by examining how women are often reviled for the same behaviors that men are exalted for. Pop culture serves as a shorthand to communicate the message; Love is simply one example of many. The rough brushwork underscores what happens when women don’t smooth out their images to fit into preconceived narratives.

Courtesy of Five Car Garage

Sullivan and Stoltmann’s themes dovetail with Kyla Hansen’s The Trouble with Goodness, also on view in the gallery. Hansen uses the medium of quilting to encapsulate the ways in which women are hemmed in by tradition, breaking the traditional – and traditionally marginalized – form with crooked and irregular shapes and hidden messages in the fabric. While not initially perceptible, the shapes and colors resolve into letters, rewarding closer scrutiny of the painstaking detail in an object that most people take for granted. With provocative titles like “Hot Slit,” “Slow Poke,” and “Bleed Until We Are Even,” they blend modern sensibilities with artistic traditions like Gee’s Bend. They are a colorful and joyful act of protest, encompassing pain and enthusiasm and shifting emotion – everything that happens underneath the covers. 

“Female Sensibility” and “The Trouble with Goodness”
January 11-March 1 2020
5 Car Garage, Santa Monica