April 5 – July 28, 2022
Two Spirit Lakota
Photographs by Magdalena Wosinska
Magdalena Wosinska spent several weeks in Pine Ridge Indian reservation, photographing her series “Two Spirit Lakota”, looking to show the beauty of the Two-Spirit community in Pine Ridge – which is often subject to harsh or unfavorable headlines. She states, “I wanted to show the pride, the freedom to be who you are, and their confidence and empowerment”.
Wosinka’s early personal work, documenting the lives of her friends emerging from the skate and metal music scenes, reveals her willingness to challenge accepted norms for a female photographer. In her effort to explore complex topics, she documents diverse groups of people in diverse settings. From transgender skate crews, to cowboys in South Central, Wosinska brings her eye to settings that are thought-provoking, beautiful, and at times even controversial, always inspiring the viewer to abandon passivity and question what they are seeing.
Wosinska was born in Katowice, near Krakow in Poland, in 1983. She arrived in the USA in 1991 and lived in Arizona before settling in Los Angeles in 2004. Her first publication, “Bite It You Scum”, was launched in 2010 at the opening of ‘Exposed’, an exhibition she curated for Webber Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. Magdalena’s 2nd book, “The Experience Vol 1”, was published with adjoining solo shows in London at the Webber Represents Gallery, Munich at the Ingo Seufert – Gallery for Contemporary Photography, Luxembourg at the VIOLife Gallery, Amsterdam at W+K , Los Angeles at Dilletante Gallery featuring the book. Her 3rd book, “Leftovers of Love”, was released November 2018 with a solo show at Merchant Gallery In Venice, CA.
Images: Courtesy Magdalena Wosinska
April 7 -June 28, 2022
DISGUST: unhealthy practices
east window will host a group exhibit on the theme of disgust. This exhibit is the result of an open call for work by writers and artists around the world.
Opening reception:
April 7, 2022
6:30-8pm
Following the reception the gallery will be open by appointment only until further notice.
Schedule your visit HERE
east window SOUTH
4949 Broadway Unit 102-C
Boulder, Colorado 80304
DISGUST is often seen as the bridge between our moral imperatives and the wilds of survival; the cusp of emotion and instinct. Activated in response to what we perceive or imagine as revolting, sick, infectious, diseased, contaminated and thereby threatening, disgust signals our awareness of fissures between feelings of safety and peril, stability and insecurity; of disjunctions that threaten facets of our personal identity and society at large.
Our collective actions relative to our experiences of disgust often bear witness to damaging prejudices and rhetorics, which attempt to conflate those who we perceive as different from ourselves, socially, culturally, politically, sexually, religiously, in age or ability, with vectors of physical or moral contamination. To be clear, this project aims to confront, subvert and transform these prejudices, not reinforce them.
The images and texts which comprise this international group exhibit freely explore issues of bodily function, ownership, control, choice or lack thereof. We see works grappling with violated physical and social borders and hierarchies; the violation of gender boundaries and fluidity; notions of contagion, purity, wellness, disease and how such constructs may be used to ostracize unwanted members of various social groups. What do these representations of our bodies, belongings and psyches, seen through the lens of disgust, really mean to us, that we should impose such powerful and dangerous abstractions upon them? What roles can disgust play in re-shaping other less negative social interactions and in constructing social values that are in turn supportive of those interactions?
The often volatile emotions expressed through the works in this project make it easy to assume that the only story they tell is one of adversarial engagement and oppression. However, is it possible that through these many evocations of violated personal and collective borders, a peculiar sense of solidarity is being revealed? For when an out-group, seen from any side, becomes so close as to be indiscernible from ourselves isn’t that when it becomes most threatening?
— Todd Edward Herman
2022