STITCH 'N BITCH

Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA

March 27 - May 22, 2021

“Couzens’s fabric collages are simultaneously a critique and a revelation: materializing the sexism that undergirds the art world’s blatant inequities by targeting the gallery advertisements found in Artforum, its most high profile English-language art magazine. She intervenes in the slick, photographic sheen of the male artist’s solo show advertisement, symbolically covering over the men with a feminized art form, her materially-driven graffiti, known as Textile Tags (2014-ongoing).” -Jenni Sorkin

Women’s position between chattel and agency are marked throughout education, politics, economics, social and religious life, disproportionally affecting women of color and LGBTQ communities across the world. The fundamental question whether a woman’s body is autonomous and free from State or religious control is still offensively argued. Given the many suffrage and feminist movements, the question of ‘parity’ with men still remains disturbingly faulty.

However it’s Women’s History Month, a time to reflect on progress and battles left undone.  It’s also perfect timing for Julia Couzens’s exhibition Stitch ‘n Bitch. Couzens is an uncompromising artist and writer of discerning insight. Drawing upon over thirty years steeped in the vernacular of modernist and contemporary art history Couzens focuses her critical lens on gender disparity in the visual arts.

“Textile tags,” as she calls the collages on exhibition, began as an impulsive lark in the midst of her ongoing studio practice. Much like graffiti artists claiming territory by spray painting over signs, billboards, notices, and posters, Couzens deploys a needle, thread, and fabric scraps to tag pages of art publications featuring male artists.

A focus on historical patriarchy is borne out by a leisurely jaunt through these journals, which romance the mystique of male legitimacy and authority in the visual arts. Like a vandal seamstress, Couzens tears out these full-page ads and in the insouciant spirit of taggers, stitches over them with fabric, thread, embroidery, essentially neutering their masculinity. Money begets money, and male artists dominate covers, ads, articles, and profiles, they command greater remuneration in the marketplace enhancing the prospect of further promotion, which is then corroborated through museum and private collections.

Rather than a didactic critique of patriarchy, Couzens’s Textile Tags offer a wittily inventive foray through the generally esteemed lens of fashionable art speak and criticism. She asks us to consider with nimble panache the minimizing of women’s contributions to the arts by offering up a plethora of stunning visual and conceptual interventions!