Katie Pell

Bitchen (Square Gallery)

May 5-June 22, 2007

The MAC is proud to present Katie Pell’s Bitchen in the square gallery.  Katie Pell transforms ordinary household objects into a statement on gender roles in America.  In order to do this she virtually transforms these ordinary objects by painting them and “souping” them up.  Pell’s sythensis creates an object equivalent of a double entendre, with the requisite sexual innuendo’s intact.  Pell’s art is the very best kind of feminism because it is exactly this kind of activism that gets somewhere.  Pell appears to have drawn together two disparate cultures and provided them with alternative ways of perceiving each other.  What is feminine about men gussying up their cars?  And what is masculine about women doing the same to their appliances?  The souped-up appliances not only appear as fabulous objects in their own right, but they send up the silliness of gendered categories.