Jess Pope (American, born 1984) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses dance, performance, photography, videography, and installation. She received a BA from Ringling College of Art and Design and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. In January 2023, she participated in the Micro WIP residency at the Ringling Museum of Art, creating a ten-minute performance entitled La Petite Peen Presents. In June, she performed an extended version of the performance for the Squeaky Wheel Fringe Festival, which won the Audience Choice Award. La Petite Peen Presents fuses together varied types of performance, including drag, clown, and theatre to bring forth and explore important questions about our roles in society. Petite Peen poses an alternate way of being, challenging and rejecting the traditional definition of motherhood by embracing a more contemporary and inclusive ideology of kinship. The performance explores personal identity, sexuality, and the gender binary, particularly within the context of the patriarchy and the current political climate in Florida. The story follows Petite Peen as they emerge from a slumber and begin their daily routine of getting dressed, putting on their face and wardrobe as a way of constructing their identity. Petite Peen dances while revealing and then unraveling a large crocheted penis which takes many shapes throughout the performance. Soundtracked with audio clipped from popular television shows to presidential speeches, Petite Peen moves through their story in a playfully erotic and vulnerable act of expression.
Description:
This solo exhibition brings Pope’s original stage performance into the context of a gallery for the first time, weaving together new layers of meaning through an interactive performance and an immersive installation. The SPAACES gallery will transform into an idealized reconstruction of the artists’ home, rearranged with a vintage sofa, a dining table and chairs, and a television set. Visitors are encouraged to interact with and navigate the installation the way they would in their own home, sitting down to have conversations with friends or watching nostalgic home videos. Through this environment, the artist invites visitors to find comfort in the space both physically and emotionally. The videos playing on the television feature a montage of daily life, reflecting the mundane and monotony of domestic tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and conversational moments. Pope disrupts the traditional domestic space with a large sprawling yarn installation that visitors must walk through in order to interact with the room. This tentacle-like sculpture represents a mental map of how, specifically females and mothers keep track of every aspect of life. Two of the walls are adorned with an accumulation of receipts, to-do lists, reminders, photographs, and drawings that depict the overwhelming yet necessary amount of work, attention, and unpaid labor of being a mother. The installation will also include one long table with notepads and pencils for visitors to create their own reminders and lists, and add them to the wall among the artists’. In this way, Pope connects with the audience even in her absence, relating to the pressure of life and finding one’s identity under a capitalist society.
The Performance: The artist will perform La Petite Peen Presents twice on the opening night of the exhibition in the installation space, once at 7 pm and again at 9 pm, leaving behind the remnants of the unraveled yarn as a testament to the performance once completed. The artist will move throughout and interact with the installation and the audience members. A videographer will be on site to capture the performance from several angles and the video of the performance will then be projected onto the wall in the gallery space on a loop for the duration of the exhibition. La Petite Peen Presents fits within the history of both visual and performance artists navigating concepts of identity, gender, feminism, and domesticity using their bodies, stories, and other mediums traditionally considered “craft” or “women’s work.” The exhibition presents the internal philosophies of the artist through the caricature of Petite Peen, breaks down the boundaries between the artist and the audience, and challenges participants to question their own belief systems.
