Written by Melanie Dowding ’24 | Images courtesy of La.dy.like Art

The Harry M. Drake Gallery, quaintly tucked away in a corner of St. Paul Academy and Summit School, has been transformed into a dynamic and digital feminine space this October. La.dy.like, a twin-cities art project, has put together a group of femme artists who are diving into how femininity ebbs and flows through contemporary, data-driven spaces, to form group exhibition Anomalies: Interventions into the Digitized Feminine Space. 

Among the artists participating are a few members of our MFA community: Ellen Mueller, former MFA Program Director, Ivonne Yañez, MFA ‘23, and current MFA mentor and co-founder of La.dy.like, Andrea Bagdon. Ivonne lit up the room with moving image projections on patchwork sewn fabrics and fantastically vibrant soft sculpture, lining a diagonal across the space that leads from the entrance towards the back of the gallery, where more artists have work tucked away. Andrea coincidentally also lit up the room alongside Ivonne with vibrant pinks and greens in her abstract work, one piece brightly backlit with an X-ray film viewer. She also opposes the attack of light, color, and information with projection work displayed in boxes with only a slit cut out in the front for viewing (or squinting, really). Ellen’s work provided a moment to breathe and mentally step away from the surrounding work, still surrounded by sound and blushing light from other artists. Her framed prints and slow moving, ASMR-esque videos invite the viewer to pause and pay attention, to take in detail, and to interpret work in more abstract manners.

The gallery blushes with blues, purples, and pinks from all of the lights and moving images, fluctuating as videos start and finish, flash and glitch alongside one another. The Drake Gallery has become an inviting space that creates dialogue around cyberfeminism, as curator Juleana Enright outlines in their curatorial statement: 

“If we set out under the informed guise that technology is not neutral, it is not innocent in the divide and isolation it created while operating as male-distinguished, we can use these digital texts and bodies of work found in Anomalies to reflect and crystallize the biases already present in society. These systems/cyber-induced spaces at their origin worked best for the identities that designed them: mostly cisgender, white, fit, straight men. When others attempt to participate, they often encounter errors, failures, and glitch.” (La.dy.like Art 2023)

Enright has put together a group of artists that directly speak to these errors, failures, and glitch, as much of the work in the gallery space is disruptive, bright, and/or uncanny in the ways that only digital media in an age of the internet can be. The femininity of the space is overt in work that speaks directly to stereotypical femininity (utilizing pink colors, high heels, or the femme body) and provides a necessary lens with which other works are interpreted. Overall, each artwork brings a unique perspective to this evolving dialogue around cyber spaces and those using them, who benefits, and who digital systems are designed for.

Anomalies: Interventions into the Digitized Feminine Space is on view until November 3, 2023.