Through a three-way cycle of outstanding films made over the past seven years, Eve Fowler has surrounded herself with working women. Shot in 16mm, black and white with her who loves her if she must be, 2016, depicts artists doing what they do in their studios, day in and day out. For Part II, 2019, she focused more explicitly on female artists who flourish during their “late career” phases and the breakthroughs still occurring there. The third piece of the film trifecta, Work, 2023, is a nine-channel video installation showing close-up views of her subjects’ hands. For his first solo exhibition at Gordon Robichaux, Fowler presented this work as a grid of flat-screen monitors attached to poles that extended from floor to ceiling. The installation represents, in turn, Leilah Babirye brandishing a torch, Jennie Jieun Lee drawing judiciously on ceramics and Sara VanDerBeek painting on a photograph. A host of other short vignettes feature Kelly Akashi, Isabelle and Lita Albuquerque, Fiona Connor, Jean Foos, Aimee Goguen, Samara Golden, Kate Hall, Siobhan Liddell, Nevine Mahmoud, Reverend Joyce McDonald, Liliana Porter, Adee Roberson, Ana Tiscornia , Uman, Faith Wilding and Rosha Yaghmai have engaged in different types of fabrication. Although silent, Work speaks volumes about the determination of women on virtually every front, despite the constant threats they face to their livelihoods and freedoms.
Fowler is well known for her celebrated collaborations: in 2008, she co-founded, with Lucas Michael, Artist Curated Projects, an organization whose mission is to foster opportunities for underrepresented artists to develop their skills and ideas in conservation in order to exhibit the work of their peers. Throughout Fowler’s presentation here, a similar cross-generational, feminist, and queer community ethic could be found, including the artist’s mention of the production team behind Work—Rhys Ernst, Mariah Garnett, Michael and Olivia Ambrosia Taussig-Rees—in the press release. Many of these people have also worked on Florence Derivative, 2023, a 16 mm color film transferred to video projected here on a large wall. After reading Derive’s autobiographical essay, “The History of Herstory,” published in 2011 by online journal Seymour Magazine, Fowler embarked on this stunning nearly twelve-minute meditation (which she performed with the additional help from Clément and Léonard de Hollogne). In the piece, the trans artist stares straight into the camera uninhibited as she sits in her Paris studio. An audio recording of Derive reading her text in French plays, in which she recounts growing up in “protected environments. . . filled with warmth and wonder” and the many beautiful afternoons she spent with her grandmother in Nantes, France. She later describes a homophobic teacher whose bullying led to her being expelled from school, and the growing realization that she was always a girl, inside and out.
Rounding out the show are eight testimonial-style collages from 2022 that are part of a work in progress. For these pieces – constructed from hand-cut green, yellow and blue block letters mounted on white paper and echoing the style of previous text objects – Fowler drew inspiration from her daytime practice of jotting down various observations. Most of the works resembled concrete poetry: for example, one read THE BUZZ IS STRONG TODAY THERE ARE CARS AND BIRDS AND THAT’S ALL, while another asserted that GOD IS AND WAS A WOMAN. Amen to that.
As we once again face a divisive partisan culture war in the United States, fueled by Republican grandstanding and party attacks on basic human rights, Fowler’s art reminds us that the plat -the most important political form for our creative work is at the level of everyday life. , where it can unfold quietly, collectively and subversively.
