"Beast Boutique" by Jennifer Avery at Yellow Peril

Providence, RI, December 24, 2015 --(PR.com)-- Yellow Peril Gallery is pleased to announce Beast Boutique, born out of Jennifer Avery’s Artist Residency with the Hermès Foundation, from January 16 – March 12, 2016. As the first American artist chosen for this prestigious program, Avery collaborated with seamstresses from the Holding Textile Hermès and their fabric printing facilities for four months and created 300 performative objects from opulent gold, silk, cotton and fleece fabrics printed with her drawings, photocopies, and repurposed trash from Hermès. The Providence establishment of Beast Boutique is its second iteration in the United States after Avery’s first solo presentation at SATELLITE Miami Beach 2015 during Art Basel Week.

Beast Boutique deconstructs “Little Red Riding Hood” and merges the personalities of Little Red, Grandmother and Wolf into one body – a patchwork of fragmented identities that inhabit an architecture that is both forest and boutique, and oscillates between selling her dolls (an act of prostitution / commodity / pleasure) and creating them (an act of passion / auto-eroticism / necessity). Both acts critique and celebrate the performance of femininity and Eros simultaneously.

In medieval manifestations of the fairytale, the Wolf asks Little Red if she will follow the path of pins or the path of needles to Grandmother’s house. According to ethnographer Yvonne Verdier, this phrase reveals a passage of time marking the liminal space of child to woman. Young girls would spend three months with local seamstresses to learn the art of sewing and the performance of femininity and Eros. The metaphor for this transformation was “gathering pins.” While pins mark the path of socially approved expressions of female sexuality, needles imply a wanton maturity. Imagine the gesture of threading a needle through its “eye” in English or “cat” in French, the rhythmic repeated piercing of fabric with needle and thread, and the euphuism seamstresses mutter when they accidently pierce flesh and draw blood (“aii, j’ai vu le loup!”, “oh, I saw the wolf”, “ouch, I lost my virginity”). As she walks through the forest of paradox and feminist action, will our heroine choose the path of pins or the path of needles?

The opening reception for Beast Boutique is Saturday, January 16, from 6PM – 9PM. A special performance of Pupa, Poubelles et Les Betês: An Evening to Decide Upon the Path of Pins or the Path of Needles will be presented on Saturday, February 20, from 7PM – 9PM. The exhibition will conclude Saturday, March 12, with a closing reception. This is Avery’s second solo exhibition at Yellow Peril since (numb) Charlottes in 2014.

About Jennifer Avery
Jennifer Avery is a resumed under graduate (RUE) student at Brown University and an editor for Inred med Magi. She cut her teeth in the alt/cabaret movement of the most recent fin de siècle, and received her Associates degree in Fine Art from Bristol Community College in 2012. Avery is represented by Yellow Peril Gallery in Providence, RI. For more info about Jennifer Avery, visit jenniferlavery.com.