On Friday Night at the Spark Contemporary Art Space [11] in Syracuse, the art collective Girl on Girl [12] organized an art exhibit showcasing multitudes of art pieces ranging from videos, sculpture, and photography.
Keaton Fox, Maddie Holloway and Meg O’Malley founded Girl on Girl Productions in December 2012 as a way to elevate female art in the Syracuse community especially throughout the university, according to the group's Facebook page [13]. “I like that Girl on Girl is female dominated and empowered by females and we run it and do the dirty work,” said art history junior Alexis Christine Maine, one of Girl on Girl's organizer’s.
Since then, the group has strived to put on a show each semester celebrating women, artwork and artists. What used to be only inclusive to women artists has now become open to artwork from everyone that sends them pieces of work they want seen in the show.
“We decided our genre of tonight was being a part of a generation and when you’re a part of a generation you make art that is inflectional,” Maine said. “It’s influenced upon where you grew up and how you are. Being millenials that influences our art.”
Girl on Girl featured creative artwork from displays of post-it-notes, photographs based on body hair and a shrine dedicated to technology. There was also a projection of a video on a jean jacket hanging on the wall and a bathroom compacted with tinsel, glitter and streamers.
The art space was packed with people as the guests admired the art, talked amongst themselves and were served drinks. One of the guests, marketing and supply chain management senior Priscilla Mahabali, appreciated the Girl on Girl’s stance on feminism. “It’s important to have female voices be heard and it’s great that they want to have women express themselves through different art forms,” Mahabali said.
Although all the artwork presented at the show wasn’t completely feminist, Girl on Girl wants its artists to understand its desire to have feminism represented in art, said College of Visual and Performing Arts junior Lauren Harper, another organizer of the event. “I don’t feel like the work that comes here has to be feminist, but I think that it’s important that to make sure it’s understood that that is very important to us, so therefore if you submit to the show you should be behind those ideals as well,” Harper said. “I just think it’s important to create space for that and to be concerned with not just the art, but also the people involved.”
