Micol-Hebron_Where-Are-The-Women_AnotherYearInLA_September-October

Micol Hebron

Where are the women and what are they doing?

September 1 - October 31, 2023

Where are the women and what are they doing exhibition

"I have been using Midjourney to engage in lengthy explorations of the rhetoric of prompts, investigating how large language models interpret and decipher requests for image generations. I have been using simple and generalized phrases, familiar idioms, references to the history of art and photography, to research how AI visualizes gendered language and images, specifically with regard to tropes of the feminine. I'm also looking at how emergent AI compiles complex aesthetics - natural textures, fluid motion, complicated compositions, depth perception. I am not interested in emulating 'reality' or creating images with convincing (deceptive) verisimilitude, but rather am very curious about what kinds of imagery I can produce with AI that are truly unique and characteristic of AI's way of 'seeing'." - Micol Hebron, Los Angeles, August 2023

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Micol Hebron is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes studio work, curating, writing, social media, crowd-sourcing, teaching, public-speaking, and both individual and collaborative projects. Hebron employs strategies of consciousness-raising, collaboration, generosity, play, and participation to support and further feminist dialogues in art and life. She has presented exhibitions, performances, and lectures at artistic institutions around the world. She has been engaged in individual and collaborative artistic and social justice projects in Los Angeles since 1992.

Hebron is an Associate Professor of Art at Chapman University; the founder/director of The Situation Room resource space for the creative community in Eagle Rock; the Gallery Tally Poster Project about gender equity in contemporary galleries; and the Digital Male Nipple Pasty/Gender Equity initiative for the internet. Hebron currently serves as an advisor for the Art + Technology Lab artist's grant at Los Angeles Museum of Art. In the past she has been the visiting Chief Curator at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art; the director of the UCLA Summer Art Institute; an editorial board member at X-Tra magazine; an independent curator; a conservator at LACMA, and the co-founder of Gallery B-12 in Hollywood in the 90s. She has served on advisory boards at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Birch Creek Ranch Residency (Utah), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, UCLA., and the Centre Pompadour in France. She is the founder of the LA Art Girls, the Co-Founder of Fontbron Academy, and the founder of Feminist Summer Camp, in Ephraim, Utah, and Ercourt, France.

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WOMEN/ROCK

ARTIST STATEMENT

I think about rocks a lot.

Rocks are so specific, so textured, infinitely varied in their size and shape. I have, in my life, structured travel around visiting notable rocks (the stalactites and stalagmites of Carlsbad Caverns, the Giant Rock in Landers, the Mo'ai of Easter Island, Stonehenge, Half-Dome in Yosemite, the Ringing Rocks in Montana, the Tufa in Mono Lake, the Hoodoos of Utah, the sailing stones of the Mojave).

When I hold a rock, I feel like I am holding the whole Earth.

Rocks, it occurs to me, are also some of the most basic objects. But these primitive objects have become so many things: tools, weapons, fire-starters, houses, beaches, mountains, jewelry, art, even 'pets'. And I think of this song, which played in the small wooden cabin in the Redwoods when I was 7 or 8: I am a rock

Hopefully, by now, you are thinking of rocks that you have loved, rocks that you would like to see and touch.

I am told that in South America, people move river rocks around to tune the sounds of the river's flow.

There are so many mystical and magical rocks in our cultural mythologies - the boulder Sisyphus was condemned to push, the Excalibur stone, Joseph Smith's seer stones, Wyoming's Devils Tower in Close Encounters, the stone of soup fame, the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And what about Oumuamua?!

Thankfully, rocks are immune to the social systems of gender. Though it is notable that this past summer, women of Rock have changed the economic landscape.

At the same time, it is painful to think about how many women are removed from our landscape as they are still murdered with rocks.

I asked AI to show me women holding rocks. I wanted to know how artificial intelligence, arguably the most complex and sophisticated of human creations, would render the most natural form of a 'simple' rock; the texture, the weight.

And how would the women be holding them? How would their skin touch the rocks? How would the women bear the weight of them?

The title of each piece is the name of a woman who is significant in the world of rocks - which is your world.

Please click on their names to learn more.

--Micol Hebron, Los Angeles, August 2023

Rachel, 2023