Yellow Peril Gallery presents Beast Boutique by Jennifer Avery at SATELLITE Miami Beach 2015

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. - Oct. 27, 2015 - PRLog -- Yellow Peril Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in SATELLITE as part of Artist-Run, Tiger Strikes Asteroid’s curated international representation of nearly 40 installations in a repurposed hotel, presented by Art Market Productions in conjunction with Miami Project and Art on Paper Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach 2015 from December 1-6.  The Providence-based contemporary art gallery will present an installation of Beast Boutique, born out of Jennifer Avery’s Artist Residency with the Hermès Foundation.  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.

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?

SATELLITE is a series of on-site and offsite projects and events fostering experiential and exploratory interactions with art, which includes Artist-Run under the curatorial direction of Tiger Strikes Asteroid at Ocean Terrace Hotel.  The Press Preview + Vernissage for SATELLITE is Tuesday, December 1, from 4PM – 10PM.  General Hours will commence on Wednesday and Thursday from 11AM – 9PM, Friday and Saturday from 11AM – 10PM, and Sunday from 11PM – 6PM.  This is Jennifer Avery’s first solo presentation during Art Basel Miami Beach. She previously presented work with Yellow Peril at SCOPE Miami Beach 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.