The Sarah Doyle Women's Center held an opening reception Friday for its month-long exhibition of works by artist Candice Smith Corby to celebrate Women's History Month. The artist explores objects and spaces that have simultaneously been cherished by women and have confined them from the American colonial era to the present day.
Instead of using a typical stretched canvas, Smith Corby paints on materials traditionally associated with women and femininity, such as embroidered cloth-napkins, floral wallpaper, delicate doilies and small tapestries.
One painting, rendered with delicate detail on a small napkin, contains a setting of blue Chinaware beneath a chair covered with a fabric of luscious pink and red floral designs. "Guten Appetit," also painted on a napkin, depicts two images of the same woman - one about to swallow a frog and another about to swallow a key.
The artist's use of domestic materials makes the room look less like a conventional gallery and more like a home. Upon first glimpse, each piece seems fun, quirky and almost cute. One might even be inclined to dismiss Smith-Corby's works as decoration. But her work is not simply decoration. Instead she uses craft and adornment to make a powerful artistic statement.
A wall-length piece, "A Good Wife," is a particularly poignant, even disturbing piece that explores the fine line between submissive acceptance and full acceptance by women of their designated role in society. In a portrait-like composition, a modern-day woman wears a George Washington-like wig and holds up her left hand in the "scout's honor" salute. A ribbon that flows around and above her lists all the things a "good wife" is presumably expected to do, including that she "takes his name," "is always pleasant" and "is available."
Upon a closer look, intricate floral wallpaper patterns gracing the background become visible, as does the paper-thin material on which the whole piece is painted. It then becomes all too clear that the work is not a revering portrait of a woman. Rather, it portrays a wife as wallpaper, an unnoticed ornament meant to fade into the background.
Smith Corby explores the ambiguities of domestic space, but more subtly she investigates the assumed differences between craft and art and their intimate relationship to women. The exhibit runs until March 31.
