Rebirth: Our Fertile Planet Art Exhibit
An art exhibit exploring the connection between birth and the earth
Being an artist, I am thrilled when an exhibition opens in town that pertains to sexuality or erotica. Unfortunately, Halifax is so conservative, erotic art shows or art exhibitions that contain sexual themes are rare. Thankfully, Venus Envy (Halifax’s favorite sex-positive sex toys shop) has various art exhibitions throughout the year to satisfy the need to feed our erotic imaginations.
On May 1st (just in time for Masturbation Month) a new show opened, Rebirth: Our Fertile Planet which is an exhibit that explores “the connection between birth and the earth”. Curated by Shannon Hardy, the initial idea came out of her work as a practicing Doula at Halifax Birth.
“I am very passionate about birth & women and I’m fascinated by a woman’s capacity to not only birth a child but to simultaneously take on a new identity (that of mother). I also believe there is a strong connection between our (women) ability to create and sustain human life and our role at the forefront of the environmental scene.”–Shannon Hardy
Not surprisingly, women and their bodies in art and ancient cultures have often signified nature, earthly desires, birth, abundance and fertility. So, the theme of this show comes rather “naturally”. However, unlike much art created by the virile “masters” where women were usually objects or muses, the works in this exhibit celebrates female sexuality.
Philip Doucette is a Halifax glass artisan who created as series of Yonic Plates for the exhibit. These clear, sandblasted or colored fused glass plates are about the size of salad plates and square in design. Each one features an image of a Yoni, some linear and stylized, while others are more realistic and “painterly”. One in particular has three smears of red and droplets like blood, which are reminiscent of women’s menses.
JJ Steeves works are colorful mixed-media paintings on canvas with lush backgrounds with expressive nude portraits of women. In one, the subject has her head thrown back with abandon as she masturbates provocatively, her vulva wide and exposed to the viewer.
Evyeneia Manolakos, owner of Foxy Moon Hair Gallery, uses natural light to highlight her subjects, enhancing the texture and shape capture to beauty in the world around her in black and white photographic portraits. The series depicts fine art nudes of a woman in a self-embracing, healing poses.
Kiersten Holden’s installation piece “Making Maybes” is curious and unusual. As a multidisciplinary artist and musician who works with metal, ceramics, and sound, Holden’s work features strangely organic ceramic shapes, unglazed and white, that are reminiscent of teardrop-shaped alien pods. Some of the pods have long, umbilical cord appendages curling upward, broken off or tangled on top of the pod. In her artist statement, she states that she “utilized the unpredictability of material and process as a daily practice to foster acceptance of impermanence, chance, and change with the goal of addressing issues of fear, control, trust, and connectivity in relation to fetal development and childbearing.”
Rebirth: Our Fertile Planet will be on display at Venus Envy, 1598 Barrington St. Halifax, NS, the entire month of May, so go out and get your erotic art fix.
Posted on May 14th, 2010 by Shannon
Filed under: A Very Doula Pregnancy, Canadian Birth Community, From one mom/woman/wife to another, Halifax Birth Events & Classes, Halifax birth community, I'm not just a mommy and a doula, SEX, feminism
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