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Embodiment installation view at Howard Yezerski Gallery

 

Lalla Essaydi: Embodiment
November 7 - December 16th, 2008

 

For Immediate Release

 

Howard Yezerski Gallery will be celebrating the much-anticipated opening of its new location at 460 Harrison Avenue on November 7th. After 15 years on Newbury Street the Gallery is pleased to be joining the growing gallery scene in the South End of Boston.

The Gallery is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition Embodiment: an installation by Lalla Essaydi, which will be on view from November 7th - December 16th. Using her unique perspective as woman born in Morocco and now living in the West, Essaydi makes work that addresses the complex reality of Arab female identity.

An early work by Lalla Essaydi, the Embodiment installation consists of 8’ x 4’ panels of fabric that are suspended from the ceiling. Each of the panels depicts imagery of Moroccan women whose bodies, clothes, and surroundings are inscribed with Arabic writing done in henna. The installation was first shown at the Tufts University Art Gallery, its theme of exploring the relationship between memory and experience, and the use of the female body is seminal to the work in both her later series, Converging Territories and Le Femmes du Maroc. In Islam there are spatial boundaries for men and women, the presence of men defines public spaces, streets, and meeting places while women are confined to private spaces. By inscribing the women's bodies with henna and photographing them in the constrained space of their "proper" place Essaydi emphasizes their decorative role while also interrogating the silence of confinement in which they live. The women speak visually in the photographs to one another, to the surroundings and certainly to the viewer.

Investigating the tension between the confinement and the fluidity within Islamic traditions, Essaydi is ever respectful of the culture that she was nurtured in as a child and that has as an adult allowed her to question the role of women and gender boundaries within Islam. In her current work she continues to not only explore the special bond of women in her own culture but also take on the western stereotypes of these relationships as well.

Lalla Essaydi has had recent exhibitions in New York, London, The Netherlands, and Houston TX. Essaydi was born in Morocco and lived in Saudi Arabia before moving to the United States to start her Masters degree. She received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/ Tufts University in 2003. Her work can be found in the collections of among others: The Art Institute of Chicago, The Fries Museum in the Netherlands, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, The Mead Art Museum at Amherst,
and the Williams College Museum of Art.

 

For further information please contact Alexis Dunfee at Howard Yezerski Gallery 617.262.0550 Tuesday - Saturday 10-5:30pm