MB Hanrahan: Body of Work

Artist Talk: Sunday, Nov. 20, 4 p.m.

“I don’t live in my wounds… but I do like to tell truths.” – MB Hanrahan

For three decades, MB Hanrahan has been a core artist in the Ventura art scene. Hanrahan is well known for her four 45-foot Tortilla Flats mural installations, produced in collaboration with Moses Mora, at the Figueroa St. overpass, near the Ventura County Fairgrounds, as well as her affiliation with Art City, the Artists Union Gallery, and Bell Arts Factory, as well as her numerous other public art projects. Hanrahan’s new exhibit, the conceptual, photo-based performance art, Body of Work, consists of nude portraiture contextualized within the framework of popular, self-made holiday postcards and coupled with feminist art/social theories. The work spans 20 years of MB Hanrahan’s humorous and transgressive nude holiday cards, featuring MB as model, object and subject. The photographs emerge from various configurations and settings that collectively create a cast of characters from a pool of roles and archetypes  sex-kitten pin-up, heroine, goddess, ghost, cook, homemaker, warrior, angel, and more. MB worked collaboratively with numerous area photographers in the creation of each cards incarnation, according to her concepts/direction/staging.

With artistic influences such as Cindy Sherman, Eleanor Antin, Patti Smith, and David Bowie, as well as Feminist theorists, and confrontational performance art groups such as Pussy Riot in the former USSR and the Riot Grrrls in the US, each of MBs cards touch upon the condition of women in society, maintaining a strong authorial voice and unapologetically idiosyncratic artistic identity.

Since 1996, the signed and numbered postcard editions have been mailed to hundreds of recipients around the world, amusing/challenging/confronting notions of socially constructed and/or circumscribed gender roles and feminine identity. The collection of cards began with the first Halloween pumpkin-headed pin-up girl, and moves through cards that interpret MBs personal journey through drug addiction recovery, the death of her father, physical injuries, and her gender-bending advances in Xmas/Easter/St. Patricks Day/Thanksgiving/Labor Day/Independence Day parodied Play-Boy bunnies.

While MB provides, what at first blush may appear as, yet another nude female form, it quickly becomes clear that something subversive is afoot. She has orchestrated images that are anti-pornographic, unavailably auto-erotic, or that largely presents the female form as subject in sexually and/or gender dominant positions that seize power and deny typical fulfillment of the male gaze or unharried perpetuation of societal patriarchal hegemony. Formal aspects of the cards, staging, titles, carefully used cultural references, and other direct messaging from the artist that is built into the card designs, informs the audience that MB, the artist and the female subject are in control of her body, her work and her own story.

As MB has remarked, the cards say, ”This is me stretched. Now you stretch yourself.”

For MB’s Body of Work exhibition, the holiday card images are being reinterpreted in a new way from the post-card format local collectors have seen over the last 20 years of the project. The exhibition also gives new and old viewers of the work a chance to appreciate and absorb the critical mass that this important and exciting work offers.

MB Hanrahan’s Body of Work makes meaningful contributions to this interesting chapter of art history, and is a must-see Ventura arts event.

“The Body of Work” artist book and exhibition is co-curated and produced by Dina Pielaet, Amy Jones and MB Hanrahan.

SHOW SPONSORS INCLUDE:

Patti Channer

451 Media

Buena Tile + Stone

Deby Tygell