Curated by Andrew Ingall

February 4 – May 21, 2017
Sara Bedrick Gallery

Opening reception: Saturday, February 4, 5–7 pm
Artist & Curator talk: Saturday, April 1, 2pm

The exhibition Sara Greenberger Rafferty: Gloves Off will present recent work by the Brooklyn-based artist known for unsettling works that contend with topics such as domesticity, the body, consumer culture, fashion, and violence. Over the past decade, Rafferty (b. 1978) has referenced the language, gestures, and props associated with stand-up comedy using a variety of media. 

The boxing term “gloves off”—frequently used as a metaphor to characterize brutal political campaigns and post-9/11 military interrogation—aptly describes the subtle aggressions in American popular culture Rafferty lays bare.

The exhibition features installations on walls and floors, a new video and multiple works, including one measuring 20 feet long, consisting of prints on acetate, painted and mounted on hand-cut Plexiglas. Rafferty presents these Plexiglas pieces as a “rogue’s gallery” of high-fashion figures. Like a row of mug shots in a police station, Rafferty mediates and exhibits figures in designer clothing sourced from retail websites.
 

Blurring the lines between two and three dimensions, Rafferty attaches her wall-mounted works using custom-painted screws that break up the images. She also deploys cracked paint resembling viscous bodily fluids, furthering “wounding” the objects. 

Over the past decade, Sara Greenberger Rafferty has referenced the language, gestures and props associated with stand-up comedy. This exhibition includes a new large-scale work entitled "Jokes on You," featuring images of ephemera from the collections of the National Museum of American History, which was part of Rafferty’s study during her Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Index cards from the Phyllis Diller “Gag File,” scanned and re-contextualized by Rafferty, underscore the trauma associated with cultural mores that assert control over women’s bodies, such as marriage and consumerism.

Gloves Off also includes photographs and prints that evoke the theme of damage. To create one set of black and white images, Rafferty paints on paper, punctures the finished work, and photographs the result. In a series of Phyllis Diller portraits, Rafferty scans found images, transfers them to paper, and distorts them using a “waterlogging” technique. In another grouping printed directly on Plexiglas, biomorphic forms—including weapons, comedy props and other objects associated with both tragedy and humor—accumulate and spread like cells across the wall’s surface.

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