JUDI WERTHEIN

UNNAMED

Sep 21  |  Oct 18, 2017

Dot Fiftyone Gallery Is Proud to Present Judi Werthein’s 2017 Solo Exhibition in Miami


“Unnamed” is a tribute to “women martyrs,” those who have been sentenced and executed in many societies, both ancient and modern, around the world. From accusations of witchcraft, superstition and heresy that plagued Central Europe at the beginning of the Modern Age — where it’s estimated that somewhere between 60,000 and 5 million women were burned at the stake for witchcraft and heresy — to the horrible modern-day feminicides in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, or Argentina, as well as the killings in Ethiopia and Rwanda. And that’s without taking into account many other countless references to “daily massacres,” such as domestic violence, trafficking of women, honor killings, or the practice of female genital mutilation in Africa.

“Unnamed” consists of two pieces: in the main gallery, “Memorial for Witches and Bitches” (a 1:1 scale model for a public monument); and, in the adjoining space, “Reading Room,” a library filled with publications by a variety of authors, with topics ranging from witchcraft to the discovery of the highest female pleasure.

The exhibition is a denunciation of the standardization of misogyny in the form of a “witch hunt” and of the extermination of women in general, a global disease with generalized mechanisms of impunity that has reached epidemic proportions.

Formal gestures taken from art history become a tribute to artists within Werthein’s frame of reference. The artist challenges us to discover those allusions that constitute a cross between the history of representation and the endless roster of extinguished lives. It’s the stage where the disintegration of the body is simultaneously juxtaposed to its sublimation, from the point of view of eroticism and beauty.

The works in this exhibition are an elegy to the absent body, to the omitted subject, to the abolished identity. Werthein invites us to delve into the millenary pyre where ancient female bodies and their respective histories have been reduced to ashes, with a disregard for their desires, their ambitions, and their lineage. It’s a pagan ritual where the “female entity” is celebrated and mourned from the point of view of sensuality, taking into account the erotic game as an alternate route toward violence.

In these works body islanguage: it is what the spectator has imagined; it is the myth behind the vacuum. The body is not a cause, but the effect; it’s subjectivity and consequence.

Dot Fiftyone Gallery is located at 7275 NE 4th Ave, Little River, Miami. The hours are Monday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday by appointment. For further information and visuals of the show, contact the gallery at 305-773-6537 or by email at isaac@dotfiftyone.com