This exhibition features an intergenerational group of women artists whose work explores representations of identity. Working in photography, video, and film, through assemblage, collage, multipart portraiture, and the use of avatars both analogue and digital, these artists reckon with the complex and changeable elements that inform who we are. These selves emerge from intersecting confrontations: with the artist’s own image, with the weight of personal and social stereotypes of race, class, gender, and age, and with the ambivalent promises of technology. These hybrid and multiple selves are depicted through mirroring and cloning, repetition and transfiguration.
Made between the late 1990s and today, the work on view has roots in feminist art historical discussions of the ways artists have visualized selfhood as manifold, presenting portraits that in their multiplicity and radicality challenge patriarchal ways of looking that define narrowly while presuming broadly. Featuring work ranging from cut-photograph collage to an exploration of life-extending artificial intelligence, the exhibition considers our enduring impulse to push against the limits of the discrete human body—from stretching the boundaries of representation to anticipating a future in which our consciousness is not bound to a physical body at all.
Transcending the singular, unified self is a psychological and political aspiration—to appear in all the disparate ways that we are—as well as a future, technology-enabled reality. The artists brought together here create a space in which the feeling of longing for other possibilities of being and being seen is made palpable.
– Marina Chao, Curator
Multiply, Identify, Her features work by Geta Brătescu, Stephanie Dinkins, Christina Fernandez, Barbara Hammer, Roni Horn, Wangechi Mutu, Gina Osterloh, Sondra Perry, Lorna Simpson, and Mickalene Thomas.
The exhibition catalogue Multiply, Identify, Her is available for purchase in the ICP Museum shop for the duration of the show.
Barbara Hammer (with Ingrid Christie, camera), What You Are Not Supposed to Look At #5, 2014. Collection Florrie Burke. © Barbara Hammer, courtesy the artist and Company Gallery, New York. Photo: Lou Bank.
Gina Osterloh, Press and Outline, 2014. © Gina Osterloh, Courtesy the artist, Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles; Higher Pictures, New York; and Silverlens, Manila.
Lorna Simpson, Blue Wave, 2011. The Studio Museum in Harlem; gift of the artist on the occasion of the Romare Bearden (1911–1988) Centennial and the Bearden Project. © Lorna Simpson, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Geta Brătescu, Autoportret în oglindă [Self-Portrait in the Mirror], 2001. © Geta Brătescu, Courtesy the artist; Ivan Gallery, Bucharest; Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Ștefan Sava.
Stephanie Dinkins, Conversations with Bina48, 2014−ongoing. © Stephanie Dinkins, Courtesy the artist.
Mickalene Thomas, Angelitos Negros (detail), 2016. © Mickalene Thomas, Courtesy the artist and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Wangechi Mutu, Quiet motor mouth, 2015. © Wangechi Mutu, courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.
Christina Fernandez, Untitled Multiple Exposure #7 (Bravo), 1999. © Christina Fernandez, Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Luisotti.
Sondra Perry, Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation, 2016. © Sondra Perry, courtesy the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York. Photo: Jason Mandella.
Special Thanks
This exhibition has been made possible by the generous support of the ICP Exhibitions Committee, ICP's Official Hotel Partner The Standard, East Village, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, Inc.
