Yard Work

Join Craftswoman House Temporary Residence on the first day of summer Friday, June 21 for Yard Work, featuring Rachel Finkelstein, Tina Linville and Annelie McKenzie, Linda Ravenswood, Cindy Rehm, Chelsea Rector, and Marisa Williamson. Yard Work will be presented on the lawn of a private residence in Glassell Park and explores various lines of inquiry into the relationship between natural environments and the female body.

Yard Work will feature Cupcake Pillow Grass a site-responsive installation by Tina Linville and Annelie McKenzie. In honor of the longest day of the year, this project will be on view from sunrise to sunset along with a series of performances scheduled to begin at 7:30pm.

Rachel Finkelstein presents Accessorize As I See, a three-act performance display of accessories constructed from seeds, sprouts, leaves, tree bark and plants, gathered from her walks in the “urban forest” of West Hollywood.

In Gone, Marisa Williamson revisits the poorly aging American classic Gone With the Wind. In the role of Sally Hemings, Williamson utilizes variable modes of storytelling, montage, and reenactment to explore the problematic film, which engages narratives about land, love, lust, war, race, gender, class and nostalgia. Gone is an outdoor film screening, illustrated lecture, and personal deconstruction of past and present voices.

Chelsea Rector will perform The Locomotion Cover Song for Little Eva.

Leaves in the garden, burning once is Linda Ravenswood’s reflection upon the demarcation of summer. The work is convocation of bookwork, edgework, dissertation cumulus, poetic accretion, conflagration of the tyranny of ideology, and a glass of milk. 

Cindy Rehm’s Summer Skin is a private ritual intended to heal old wounds. The work is inspired by folk-magic and relies upon a transference between the interior and exterior of the body.

Artist Bios:

Rachel Finkelstein is a multidisciplinary feminist artist. She is a co-founder of Circles, the first women's film distribution group in the United Kingdom. Her work has been widely shown in Europe and Israel in such venues as the London Film Makers Co-Op, The Midland Group, ICA Cinematheque, A Women's Art Space, Half Moon Photography and Museum of Modern Art Oxford. Finkelstein was a member of the production team for Suzanne Lacy's Pacific Standard Time project, Three Weeks in January. She was also part of the performing team that recreated Myths of Rape and Liebestod. She is currently a member of The People's Microphony Camerata and she serves on the board of the Southern California Women’s Caucus for Art. Rachel Finkelstein received a BA from Saint Martin's College of Art, London, England and a MA from the Royal College of Art, London, England.

Artists Annelie McKenzie and Tina Linville have been collaborating since 2011. They work together to create site responsive installations and artworks that blur the distinctions between painting and sculpture. They have exhibited their collaborative works across California in museums, galleries and alternative art spaces such as the Torrance Art Museum, Den Contemporary, and 18^th Street Art Center. In addition to their collaborative practice, both artists maintain rigorous individual studio practices earning them numerous awards and scholarships. Annelie McKenzie was awarded the Against the Grain Award in 2012 accompanied by a $10,000 purse. Most recently, both McKenzie and Linville were awarded the Distinguished Achievement in Creative Activity Award from California State University, Long Beach. McKenzie and Linville completed their MFAs in 2013. Both artists live and work in Long Beach, CA.

Linda Ravenswood is an artist from Los Angeles, California. She holds a BFA from CalArts, an MA from Mount Saint Mary’s College and is a PhD student at the Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her performance, literary and visual artwork can be seen in galleries, archives and in venues online, in films, and in print. Her new book, Hymnal, (2012, Mouthfeel Press) is nominated for two Pushcart Prizes this year, and is available in select bookstores and online.

Chelsea Rector is a second-year MFA candidate in the department of Art at the University of California, Riverside. Her work addresses painting and singing, as modes that embody hallmarks and signs of consciousness. She was born and raised in Southern California.

Cindy Rehm is a Los Angeles based artist and educator. She is the co-founder of Craftswoman House, which recently launched Temporary Residence, a series of roving projects staged in public and private spaces. She is the founder and former director of spare room, a DIY installation space in Baltimore, MD that presented over twenty site-specific projects over a three-year span. From 2001-2004, she served on the Editorial Board of Link: A Critical Journal on the Arts. Rehm is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship in Media from the Tennessee State Arts Commission and a Learning to Love You More Grant. Her work has been shown at various national and international venues including, Woman Made Gallery; Chicago, Consolidated Works; Seattle, Goliath Visual Space; Brooklyn, Transformer Gallery; Washington DC, LACE; Los Angeles and at Festival Miden; Kalamata, Greece.

Marisa Williamson is an LA-based artist, originally from Philadelphia. She received her B.A. in visual art from Harvard University and earned her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2013. Her project as an artist is to explore and describe through performance, video, objects and images, the ways that soft technologies: ‘problem solving tools’ like narrative, language, and myth, along with hard technologies like the camera, the moving image, and the web—facilitate the rendering and surrendering of the physical and psychological body.

3436 Verdugo Vista Terrace

Los Angeles, CA 90065

in Glassell Park (just off the intersection of El Paso & Division