Menopause Recalls Puberty (M.R.P.)

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung

Curated by Andrew Woolbright

July 13  -  August 25, 2024

Opening Saturday, July 13, 2024 from 5-7pm

Below Grand is excited to exhibit “Menopause Recalls Puberty,” a solo exhibition by Molly Zuckerman-Hartung. Her first solo show in the city since 2017, Zuckerman-Hartung will be using both galleries at Below Grand.

Juliet Mitchell, British psychoanalyst and feminist, saw the importance of defining the puberty experience as its own distinct set of erotic possibilities. An Oedipal cycle marked by a kind of haywiredness and disorientation; a confusion of desire that oscillates between wanting someone and wanting to become them. Menopause on the other hand offers a lopsided symmetry (a recollecting of) this time of transfiguration and opening up. The time between puberty and menopause is, like Modernism, medium specific. (Menstruum was once an alchemical synonym for medium. )

Zuckerman-Hartung’s installation (2019-2024) is a group of drugstore printed photographs that document her studio work roughly over the last five years. Blurring the genre boundary between work and archive, it is a provisional network of photos from the studio and the artist’s life. The piece frames the studio not just as a place of making, but also as a place of marking and attending to time. By exhibiting it in the gallery, Zuckerman-Hartung extends her studio into the gallery as a place of activity. The photos document and flatten a tactile and sensile kind of memory system. The adjacencies of the grid pull you around, recycling and looping the timeline of the work. Formal relationships prompt reorientations and digressions —they subtract and they add up.

Punk now feels like a distant assembly of trace impressions. It is recalled within a range of moments: alienated, transgressive, sure-of-itself, unrefined, revolutionary, even utopian. We see a photo of the aging punk as proof of having outlived or even survived another time. It is a posture embedded in youth, but its persistence becomes a strange and wild abstraction. Punk is fundamentally a group whose activity sizzles then fizzles; its urgency cannot be meaningfully maintained. What is left is remembrance, irony, and distance. Zuckerman-Hartung lingers inside reminders of something never fulfilled. This is uncomfortable.

In her work there are crawling figures, pointing figures, and leaping figures enacting gestures from modern dance photography and the dog park. The tightly bound puppet enacts layered affects, and interacts formally with the weave, opening up the messiness and re-structuring possibilities of recovery from shame. (Think “My Red Self” by Heavens to Betsy or “Blister in the Sun” by The Violent Femmes.) For the artist, this is all towards “underlining what a punk gesture can do, what it is.” Punk and painting’s shared ironies are their suspension of/desire for closure, their issues with belatedness, and frustration with addressing events and themselves as moments that have already come and gone.  Both yearn towards the present-tense, towards becoming and towards dying.

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Molly Zuckerman-Hartung is a painter and writer who grew up in Olympia, Washington and participated in Riot Grrrl in her formative years. She attended the Evergreen State College in the 1990s, which introduced her to holistic structural ideas about aesthetics and politics. She makes paintings and cuts them up and pieces them back together with other paintings. Edge and seam become the subject, and the focus on transition has led to writing about process in painting. She is opening her attention to composting, depth psychology, poetics, climate change, doppelgängers, permaculture, New England furniture, rural transfer stations, daily rhythm, percussive rhythm, the effects of soul lag on humans, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, the color of sunlight through smoke from fires 3,000 miles away, and the emotional landscapes of students, friends and strangers alongside whom she lives. She has shown at The Blaffer Museum in Houston, TX, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The 2014 Whitney Biennial, Kadel Willborn in Karlsruhe, Germany etc. In 2021 she opened a mid-career survey show at the Blaffer in Houston, Texas, Comic Relief, accompanied by a monograph. She was a full time senior critic at Yale School of Art until 2021, and is now teaching part time at Yale and RISD, as well as low res MFA advising at various schools around the country. She is a frequent guest lecturer at schools including, in recent years, UCLA, Hunter College at CUNY, The University of Ohio, Cranbrook, University of Alabama, the SAIC Low Residency Program, and Cornell College. Zuckerman-Hartung is represented by Corbett vs Dempsey in Chicago.

She has upcoming shows at Gallerie Opdahl in Norway, Rare Visions in Boulder Colorado, and a two person show with Fox Hysen at Springs Project in Brooklyn.