Cronelogista
Yarn, plastic, thread, leather, cock feathers, snake hide, salt, oil, water, candles, silver bells, leather, aluminum, glass. 70” x 78” (Rug 5' ft diameter)
2018
White Couch Press Release:
The politics of speech is a game of gender, identity, suppression, and power. Chiara No has dedicated her craft, art, and life to reclaiming the woman tongue within a patriarchal language (American-English), feminizing the components of language-structure itself. This exhibition presents a culmination of hidden woman-worlds wherein the feminine is accessed through personalized ritual and presented as an imanently unreadable text. Sewn and edited books, personal objects, and a saturday-summoning rug will be displayed alongside the artist’s unbounded, suggestive instructions on the use of the magic circle.
In 1692 Cotton Mather’s book Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, Or The Character and Happiness of a Vertuous Woman was published in Boston. In this he wrote that a woman should "Be careful [not to] Speak too soon… And be careful that you don't Speak too much" because “'tis the Whore, that is Clamorous, and the Fool, that is Full of words." The Salem witch trials were perpetrated that same year, under the auspices of Cotton and his father, Increase Mather.
The language and ideology of Anglo-American men has shaped this nation. Chiara No responds directly to the groundwork for suppression, abuse, and murder laid out by Cotton Mather and the Anglo-misogynist mindset, utilizing the Madonna-Whore complex as a base for exploration and reinterpretation. Whores, Witches, demons, and fools are the protagonists of No’s language and art. No-language is a polysemic inversion, a demolition, of Anglo-American patriarchy.
Chiara No states that her work “wrestles with a primal repression, human to woman... The circle becomes conical as my research descends into the body politic of the past’s demons towards today’s other… The heretic, the witch, the mentally ill, the sexually and gender oppressed are all historically politicized bodies known as Demons. By considering Demons within herstory, we start empowering our Others; they are us, we are them.”
Her/Tongue makes space for borderline language. It presents the unreadable and unspeakable text as an open dialogue in living-space where the woman tongue thrives.
Cronelogista
Back detail
2018
Cronelogista
Installation view
2018
Her/metic Library
A selection of sealed books and a reading desk
2018
Her/metic Library
Detail
2018
Her/metic Library
A selection of sealed books, artifacts and vessels filled with objects of purpose
2018
Shrunken Balls
cow hide. 3” diameter x 18”
2018
Installation view
2018