Dana Hoey and Caitlin Cherry: Hello Trouble

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These two artists, from different generations, will unveil wildly different, yet related takes on the problem of how to best represent femininity. Cherry will show paintings, Hoey will show photographs. Cherry and Hoey decided to mount their work, which traffics in, and updates, deeply American iconography, next to each other so that the rich connections and differences between their unique creative processes, can be activated and clearly visible. Hello Trouble will be on view from May 19th until June 25th.

“Power, sex and the image in culture are subjects that transfix me,” says Hoey. “Caitlin Cherry’s work engages with these themes, but from the perspective of a younger, more digital generation. I’m thrilled to show with her.” Says Cherry: “Dana and I met on social media and we were introduced as collaborators by the writer Aruna D’Souza. I appreciated her artwork’s investment in representations of women, particularly she was depicting women fighting and at the time I was into weightlifting and considering getting into fighting as a hobby. We both share a deep love for unruly women and their complex relationships.”

Cherry’s paintings promote porous and fluctuating notions of gender, sexuality and racial performativity with contemporary celebrities as her “bannermen”. The practice considers the digital interfaces where these images are sourced. Her paintings read like a glitched and chaotic LCD laptop’s desktop screen, with overlapping tabs and browser tabs of research, memes, Tiktoks and porn open simultaneously with Youtube music videos. The idea of the iconic subject, is deterritorialized and information is found on the periphery. Her work captures the destabilized nature of Black femininity, particularly as it is surveilled and performed online, where it exists as an engine of culture to be mined and turned into reaction .gifs. Black femininity is networked with every instance it is performed in past, present, and future and this expanded idea of gender and race, but Cherry’s perspective does not exclude drag queens and trans women. To quote Aria Dean’s perspective in her essay “Rich Meme Poor Meme” on Laur M. Jackson’s “The Blackness of Meme Movement,” “blackness is the living tissue of memes, then memes, so black in so many ways, black as hell, constitute something similar to Robinson’s ‘ontological totality,’ a black collective being.” Through a thorough investigation of the “Yee Haw Agenda”, Cherry in Hello Trouble expresses how if a certain underinvested history is not given due service, it becomes a vehicle for futurity and a malfunction of culture in the present.

Hoey has a long history of pirating masculine tropes as a response to what she sees as flaws in traditional conceptions of femininity. She re-imagines forms of power that are not included in the conventional lexicon of femininity, often substituting aggression in places where one would normally encounter passivity. In Hello Trouble, Hoey uses herself, her karate coach and her longtime collaborator Mary C. Greening to embody icons of American masculinity typically pictured using white men: the cowboy, the flag-waver, the gun-toter and the bodybuilder. Against the backdrop of the American sublime landscape, these cinematic photographs raise questions of American feminine identity, beauty and power.