Cindy Rehm: Double-body

Jan 14 - Feb 5, 2023

Events/Programming:

February 5, 2pm: Conversation between the artist and Shana Lutker
Curated Video Program: Ursula Brookbank, Heehyun Choi, Mehregan Pezeshki, Ali Prosch, Heather Rasmussen, Kayla Tange, and Jessica Wimbley

“There will be a door that I cannot see. But cats see her.” – Hélène Cixous 

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles is pleased to present Double-body, collage drawings and a new performance by Cindy Rehm. The exhibition considers the generative possibilities of the trance state through references to automatic writing, dermatographia, and narratives produced through the body. Rehm uses imagery sourced from turn-of-of-the-century books on diseases of the female body, nature, animals, and contemporary fashion photography. Cats appear in many of the works in conversation with Hélène Cixous’ ideas around the cat as a creative conduit, a bridge between the visible and invisible realms. Rehm also looks to the work of Carolee Schneemann, who saw the cat as a medium (a material and a channel) as she explored interspecies relationships and telepathic communications in life and after death.

The works in Double-body echo ideas found in the writing of fin-de-siècle author Rachilde, who wrote through a form of possession, and an imagined shapeshifting into feline form. She developed a cerebral erotics through acts of scratching, scoring, cutting, and flaying. These visceral actions speak to animal expressions, but also to the production of a collage. There is a performative aspect to the ritual of collage-making—the collecting, cutting, composing, and pasting are processes between language and the body.

Cindy Rehm is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator. She serves as co-facilitator of the Cixous Reading Group and is co-founder of the feminist centered projects Craftswoman House and Feminist Love Letters. In 2021, she launched Hexentexte, a collaborative project at the intersection of image, text, and the body. Rehm’s interdisciplinary practice moves between drawing, performance, and video to address the cultural suppression of women’s narratives and the legacy of hysteria. Rehm’s work has been shown at venues including Elephant, Los Angeles; Woman Made Gallery, Chicago; LACE, Los Angeles; Goliath Visual Space, Brooklyn; Paul Robeson Gallery, Rutgers; ARC Gallery, Chicago; Transformer, Washington DC; Interaction IV, Sardinia, Italy; the Archeological Museum, Varna, Bulgaria; and at Mains d’Oeuvres, Saint Ouen, France. Rehm has held residencies at Performing Arts Forum in Saint Ermes, France and at Casa Lü, Mexico City. Her first book, Transference, was released by Curious Publishing in 2022.

curated by Johanna Braun