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The Park View Gallery presents All Natural, featuring the artwork of Caitlin Gill, an emerging mixed media artist. The show explores femininity and its relationship to nature, western culture and women. Women continuously are linked to nature historically and culturally yet are refused the most natural basic animal instincts and acts (territory, aggression, fitness) as these are demarcated as unfeminine, or inherently masculine. This contradiction plagues the artist, and her work attempts to reconcile how to be simultaneously feminine and natural.
Gill uses felting, sewing, and other traditional craft materials to make her work. The foreground and subjects are often larvae, dead or decomposing animals, or other uncomfortable imagery. The juxtaposition of foregrounds as described and backgrounds of lace, floral patterns, or doilies – in combination with her use of craft materials – creates a dialogue between femininity and the reality of what performing gender feels like for the artist. All Natural encourages communities of people to safely unpack these issues from an academic, political, and social space. This exhibition acts as a mechanism around which people can congregate and share in a cultural experience aimed at reclamation and empowerment. Bodies are always political – animal, female, male, and otherwise. This exhibition explores the intersection of nature, female bodies, animal bodies and how the feminine construct is inherently problematic.
Artist Bio:
Caitlin Gill is a mixed media artist living in Baltimore, Maryland. She has a B.A in Drawing and Painting from Towson University and an MFA in Curatorial Practice and Art Criticism from the Ontario College of Art and Design. She currently works as the Exhibition Manager and Artist Directory Coordinator for Maryland Art Place (MAP) in Baltimore. Gill uses printmaking, sculpting, drawing, painting, collage and fiber to create artwork which explores ideas of identity, femininity and the divergence between human and animal. Evoking ideas of discomfort and repulsion she encourages viewers to engage with how unnatural being human can sometimes feel.
