My Mother’s Closet, and the Multitudes of Womanhood

Alongside the opening of I’ll Do It Tomorrow, the Goucher faculty art showcase, on September 19th, the exhibition My Mother’s Closet also opened its doors over at Rosenberg Gallery.

Featuring the works of Emily Wisniewski, Dominique Zeltzman, Elena Volkova, Julia Kim Smith, and Bria Sterling-Wilson, My Mother’s Closet explored the multitudes that conveys various life experiences such as war, fashion, bodily autonomy, and historical legacies through the female lens. In other words, “the personal is political” – one of the cornerstone philosophies of women, gender and sexuality studies – is the central theme of each and every artwork within the exhibition.

The claim for the showcasing of the “multitudes of womanhood” can be seen with the wide range of medium that was featured within the exhibition, from Elena Volkova’s work within the Ukrainian Portraits, to the arrangements by Bria Sterling-Wilson, to the videos of Dominique Zeltsman. In her exhibits within My Mother’s Closet, Elena Volkova noted this about her project, The Me Before The War No Longer Exists: Ukrainian Portraits: 

“This project is guided by my own experience of displacement: it addresses the themes of belonging, ambiguity, liminality, and subjectivity. The resulting images reflect a sense of transition, becoming, or being in between, woven into the project’s narrative of reclaiming one’s agency.” The portraits – with all subjects being Ukrainian women who have arrived in Germany in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion into Ukraine – also created, alongside the senses that Volkova herself noted about, a sense of intimacy, as if these are candids.

The sense of intimacy is also extended to the work of Bria Sterling-Wilson, especially with the usage of personal memorabilia such as photos, candles, copies of the Bible (as it is in the case for The Altar (Grandma’s Dresser) ) or, even further, part of their body through the usage of the prosthetic legs (as it was in Shining).

Julia Kim Smith’s work extends the discovery of this work, by utilizing the quick results seen through a Google search to reveal the ways people stereotype, fear, and conjecture about people who look, are, or love somewhat differently than themselves (as in Why). 

All in all, the exhibition has created a sense of intimacy – a universal need for all human beings to have in order to foster belonging – while also leaving a lot of space for questioning and some speculation (especially with the minimal amount of artist statements within the space of the gallery). 

The only two notes that this writer wants gallery goers to keep in mind is that the Rosenberg Gallery has minimal seating space (as it is the lobby for the Kraushaar Auditorium area), and that exhibition labels are not present, but rather pins with numbers which correspond to the labels noted within the exhibition guide.