TRANSFORMER / SASS

Transformer launches its 6th exhibition season with:

SASS
September 15 – October 20, 2007
OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, September 15, 7-9pm

Featuring work in a variety of disciplines including photo-collage, video, performance, painting, drawing, and mixed media installation, SASS offers a small survey of contemporary artwork by a new generation of women artists. Holly Bass (WDC), Amanda Douglas (Lexington,KY) Natalia Fabia (LA, CA), Danniel Swatosh (NYC), and Lisa Marie Thalhammer (WDC) each explore concepts of femininity, identity, and pop culture perceptions of women through their diverse artistic endeavors.

Lisa Marie Thalhammer – The structure of Transformer’s gallery walls inspired memories of the stain glass windows within Lisa Marie’s childhood Catholic church. “As hours would pass within this structure I would loose my thoughts by gazing upon this beautiful religious iconography. Further drawing upon my young experiences working and living with in the male dominated subculture of a Middle American truck stop, I collage feminized body parts from different fashion and men’s interest magazines creating lot lizards, a slang term for a truck stop prostitute.” Embellished with appropriated gospel illuminations and Byzantine patters, Lisa Marie’s lizards are enthroned upon hand-drawn semi-trucks combining references from the two most dominate female figures within Catholic mythology; the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. “I attempt to merge these two definitions of femininity by placing the lot lizard in classic positions similar to the Madonna and Child. Cherubs, created by underwater photography of my female friends, encircle the lot lizard. They symbolize the transcending of this traditional female sexual dichotomy by referencing the rebirth of baptism.

TRANSFORMER is a Washington, D.C. based 501(c) 3 non-profit, artist-centered visual arts organization that connects and promotes emerging artists locally, nationally and internationally. Partnering with artists, curators, art spaces and other cultural entities, Transformer serves as a catalyst and advocate for emergent expression in the visual arts. Transformer’s 2007/2008 exhibition series is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities/NEA, the Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, The Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, and The Visionary Friends of Transformer.