June 11th - July 25th, 2015
Artist Talk and Reception with the artist,
July 11th, 6 to 8pm
With Feral Women Katrina del Mar continues to explore the theme of wild women who break with convention, an obsession she's had since childhood. The wildness in women, sometimes overt, sometimes subtle is, for del Mar, a manifestation of innate inestimable power and therefore a source of the divine. Large scale, hi octane, full color, super-saturated photographs could be scenes from forgotten, fantastic films. The high hard femme, the bad girl, the rocker, the biker, the surfer-selkie, are icons of a new feminist pantheon.
BIO
Katrina del Mar is a New York-based photographer, video artist, writer, and award-winning film director. Her work has been described as “beautiful” exuding an “intimate chemistry” and also as “filth of the highest quality.” Katrina herself has been described as a “major league cutie,” “a wild woman,” “the Lesbian Russ Meyer,” and “apparently, the lesbian step-child of Kenneth Anger.” Her solo exhibition GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS first presented at Participant Inc. in New York City was shown at Art Market Provincetown in the summer season of 2013. Likewise, her solo exhibition Summer Sang in Me, first presented at Strange Loop Gallery in New York City in 2014. In 2012, Katrina presented a series of films and photographs from the Golden Age of Performance Art (1988-2000) On the Edge of Society: Moments in Live Art, at Warehouse 9, Copenhagen, Denmark. Her solo exhibition, Gangs of New York was presented in 2010 at Wrong Weather Gallery in Porto, Portugal. Invited to teach at the University of the Arts in Bremen, Germany, she conducted the first ever Queer Trash Feminist Film Workshop, also in 2010. Katrina has shown her critically acclaimed Girl Gang Trilogy of films internationally, including venues such as the Museum for Contemporary Art (CAPC), Bordeaux, France, the Fringe Film Festival, London, UK, 2012; Nightingale Cinema, co-presented by Chicago Underground Film Festival, the MoMA Dome 2 in Rockaway Beach, and Bio Paradis, Reykjavik, Iceland.
Katrina’s work has garnered numerous awards including a fellowship in video from the New York Foundation for the Arts, “Best Experimental Film” from the Planet Out Short Movie Awards announced at the Sundance Film Festival, the 2010 Accolade Award of Merit, and Winner of Juried Competition, Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, MA, 2012.
Katrina is currently at work on a “non-linear, semi surreal” documentary-style web series called DelMarvelous: A Day in the Life Katrina del Mar.
"Katrina del Mar is perhaps best known for her decades-long work in video and photography, chronicling the reality and illusion of her Lower East Side friends and lovers as punk heroines; or within her girl gang movie world of strictly female population. Creating a family tree indebted equally to B-movies and diaristic photography, del Mar’s defiantly queer photographs and videos are iconic alternatives to the cultural status quo, offering an exuberant, hyper-stylized sexuality, an unapologetic feminist voice, and often guerilla-style production tactics." - Participant Inc.
"erotic, empowered and electric—think the best parts of feminism and queer theory mixed with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.” -Phillip Miner Huffington Post
“Katrina Del Mar has been active in underground film, photography and erotic fiction for two decades, and her vision is as transcendent as it is transgressive” -Carlo McCormick
“Del Mar has captured New York’s last gasp of authenticity, transforming it for eternity…” – JP Borum