Courtesy of the artist.
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Sugar & Spice: Marika Christofides
at The Loudoun House in Lexington, Kentucky, USA
20 January-24 February 2022
The Lexington Art League (LAL) has occupied the historic and dynamic Loudoun House since 1984. It’s primary spaces are activated with exhibitions and special events, community rooms, market shops, workshops, artist studios and offices. In step with LAL’s renewed mission to serve local artists, they have identified new opportunities for local artists to activate a couple of the Loudoun House’s smaller, more intimate, and underutilized alternative spaces: the tower, and the back staircase landing toward the attic.
Courtesy of the artist.
Marika Christofides’ Sugar & Spice is a print-based installation work that uses kitsch aesthetics to explore ideas of institutional misogyny. Kitschy images of girls from 1950s and 60s print ephemera–ranging from sewing packets to vintage valentines–are transformed, through digital collage, into hybrid “bug girls”. The bug girls are then screen printed, laser cut, and installed as an infestation featuring over one hundred bugs of varying sizes in the back staircase at the Loudoun House. Sugar & Spice transforms these saccharine images of ideal girlhood into more complex beings, while at the same time evoking the contradictions around which women must conform themselves–contradictions which “infest” the foundations of our culture.
(text adapted from the artist’s press materials)
INFORMATION
The Loudoun House
209 Castlewood Drive
Lexington, Kentucky 40505 USA
(859) 254-7024
HOURS:
Wednesday-Saturday, Noon-5PM
and by appointment