Girls Just Want to Have Fun, August 28-November 7, 2021. Trout Museum of Art, 3rd Floor Shattuck and GNC Galleries
Girls Just Want to Have Fun challenges the internalized sexism and self-limiting beliefs taught through one of society’s earliest and most insidious avenues: games. This two-part exhibition by the SPOOKY BOOBS—a collaboration between Amy Cannestra, J Myszka Lewis, and Maggie Snyder— borrows the language of advertising and hijacks familiar products to beat the insidious nature of misogyny at its own game. Part one of the exhibition, shown in the GNC Gallery, presents a line of faux games created through a feminist lens and with a healthy dose of humor.
Some of these games satirize popular views of women in our culture, whileothers promote more self-assured ways of dealing with people socially. Part two of the exhibition, shown in the Shattuck Gallery, features living sculptures and video installations created from repurposed toys and game pieces. This work visualizes the crippling pressure of impossible expectations stacked upon women and the seductive nature of outside forces that promise to provide guidance at the cost of women’s independent sense of self.
Girls Just Want to Have Fun reimagines elements of games and play such as Perfection, Sorry, the Game of Life, and Barbie dolls to comment on how from an early age, women are encouraged to believe that a reductive set of pink-colored experiences is their only option for satisfaction in life. At the heart of the games chosen for this exhibition is the empty promise that women will win in life if they behave in a certain way or tamp down their expectations to fit a prescribed notion of a “model woman.”
Since their formation in 2014, the SPOOKY BOOBS have presented several solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions nationally. Their work was included in the 2018 Wisconsin Artists Biennial at the Museum of Wisconsin Art and the 2019 Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. They have been featured in MS magazine and Brava magazine. In addition, the SPOOKY BOOBS have presented their work and lectures on feminist activist art at the Women’s Caucus for Art conference and as visiting artists to Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, Wisconsin.
Got feedback, thoughts, or comments?