Guns & Rain: Soft Power

27 Apr-13 May 2023

PV 27 Apr 2023, 6-9pm

Overview

Each of the artists employs unusual, tactile and gendered materials that oscillate between ideas and conceptual spaces of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’.  In doing so they challenge perceived boundaries between painting and weaving, sculpture and crafting, textile and sculpture. The artists give shape in a multitude of ways to “women’s work”, broadly defined, and to concepts of embodiment: the multifaceted and gendered bodily experience of being, making and inhabiting the world.

The show’s title “Soft Power” is borrowed from political scientist Joseph Nye’s term, coined in the late 1980s. Nye conceived of soft power as the strategic ability of nation states to co-opt rather than coerce; to attract and influence through cultural and political appeal rather than dominate with military or economic might. In this exhibition, we extend Nye’s framing of soft power to explore the capacity of women’s creative modalities to connect, challenge, reclaim, and hold our responses to self and other in powerful and authentic ways.