Cindy Rehm

The Formless is What Keeps Bleeding, Cindy Rehm, 176 pages, Perfect Bound, Edition of 50, 2024

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The Formless is What Keeps Bleeding extends Cindy Rehm’s research into lost women—those who have been silenced throughout time through suppression or appropriation. Rehm’s project is comprised of nearly two-hundred collage drawings in response to Marcel Duchamp’s installation Étant donnés. The lifeless female body central to this work contains three women central to Duchamp’s life, who remain culturally obscure: book binder, Mary Reynolds, Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins, and his second wife Alexina "Teeny" Duchamp. In this series, Rehm explores the lingering presence of these three women and considers the possibility for a line of communication between women across generations.

The female body in Duchamp’s Étant donnés is a fetish object, her waxen-flesh frozen in splayed form, the visible pubic mound rendered as a gash, a wound offered up for visual penetration for all eternity. She is the dead girl in the woods, the Black Dahlia, Laura Palmer; she is all the female bodies ravished by misogyny, all those discounted, dismissed, and dismembered throughout history. She is broken, torn apart, but in pieces she is everywhere. Her potent female energy can be divided but not destroyed. Rehm’s collages engage a kind of reparative ritual to memorialize and restore these lost women.

Green Suns, Cindy Rehm, 24 pages, edition of 50, 2023

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The text in Green Suns is inspired by language and ideas drawn from Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel Les Guérillères. Early in the book Wittig evokes the feminary, a small book that contains women’s private symbols and writing. Green Suns is itself a kind of feminary that contains the symbology of the O—the ring, the cycle, the void, the zone of death. In Les Guérillères, Wittig tells the story of a sect of women and girls who live in and through their bodies in full sensory embodiment. The women inhale primal perfumes, taste ripe fruits, drink magic elixirs, whisper in ears, dance, laugh, scream, and rip out their long hairs at the root. Wittig’s women exist in a liminal space and call forth the power of lost witches, as they chant “Despite all the evils they wished to crush me with/I remain as steady as the three-legged cauldron.”

 Blocks of text listing women’s surnames are embedded in the narrative of Les Guérillères. Wittig’s litany of names are spells, that identify and empower the women “like the eye of the cyclops.” These are women who kiss snakes and cast the shadow of the monster as they subject their make oppressors to abject violence and literal devourment. These women take up all forms of portable weapons; knives, poison, they employ their genitals as a mirror to reflect the awesome rays of the sun to blind and burn their enemies. The women foster disorder and chaos in a violent murderous uprising to destroy the language and symbols of the patriarchy. Wittig calls on a female collective to live outside the text of domination, to abolish the old symbols and start again from zero.

Second Birth, Amanda Maciel Antunes, Perfect Bound, 108 pages, edition of 100, 2023

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Second Birth is a split diary, a journey through time, and a series of correspondences between the lives of Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) and Amanda Maciel Antunes (b.1987). These two immigrant artists share a deep faith in the potency of the creative process and the collective unconscious. At twenty-one, Antunes learned English from a worn copy of Nin’s Diary IV. By chance, she now finds herself living in the Sierra Madre home where Nin lived and worked for nearly ten years in the 1950s.

Long before French feminism called for écriture feminine, Nin conceived “the language of the womb” writing composed through expressions of female experience. The diary became her ideal form, a space to record impressions of life alongside memories, dreams, and aspirations. Antunes echoes the form of the diary through her image and text translations inspired by her research of the Anaïs Nin Papers archived at UCLA. The fragments collected in Second Birth reflect meditations on motherhood, memory, time, the creative process, feminism, dreams, death, and the small moments that make up a life.

Gathering: an artist book in a box, Amanda Maciel Antunes, Tricia Avant, Cindy Rehm, Limited Edition of 50, 2023

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Gathering is a collaboration between Amanda Maciel Antunes, Tricia Avant, and Cindy Rehm that contains traces of works made over the summer months of 2022 as part of Yard Work. The limited edition box contains, zines, prints, cards, risographs, postcards, posters, and audio recordings.

Dream House, Perfect Bound, 88 pages, 2022

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Dream House marks and honors the 50th anniversary of Womanhouse. Like the destroyed physical structure of Womanhouse, the dream house is a ghost, a mirage, a utopian fantasy always in need of reconstruction. Through a collective dreaming and the use of materials old and new, we build the woman-house of today. Dream House includes the work of over ninety contributors organized into four thematic sections. Whispering Walls includes works which echo the social structures that have historically limited women’s autono- my. Body House contains renderings of the femme maison, and visceral manifestations of the body. By Her Hands considers all forms of women’s labor from mothering, housework, handiwork, and emotional labor. The final section, New Constructions, contains works that refuse easy notions of the feminine or present imaginings of utopian herlands.

List of Contributors:

Beth Abaravich, Cathy Akers, Jerri Allyn, Claressinka Anderson, Amanda Maciel Antunes, Lani Asuncion, Tricia Avant, Renée Azenaro, Gianna Ayora, Therese Bachand, Launa Bacon, Holly Boruck, Lauren Bradshaw, Polly Breckenridge, Amelia Briggs, Ursula Brookbank, Nancy Buchanan, Alicia Byler, Karen Carrie, Wai Yan Cheung, Andrea Biller Collins, Anne Colvin, Karin Crona, Sydney Croskery, Paola Daniele, Laura Darlington, Emilie Dashe, Nicole Daskas, Cherie Benner Davis, Chelsea Dean, Kim Degen, Jessica Dillon, Jessica Dolence, Lala Drona, Sleepy Ephem, Alexis Espinosa, Diana Sofia Estrada, Trisha Faye, Lea Feinstein, Rachel Finkelstein, C. Finley, Luka Fisher, Michelle Francescon, Malado Francine, Dwora Fried, Marisa J. Futernick, Vivian Geilim, Yves B Golden, Lindsay Goltz, Sarah Green, Kristy Higby, Michele Jaquis, Shalla Javid, Yvonne Jongeling, Sharon Kivland, Grace Kredell, Karolina Lavergne, Elizabeth Leister, T. Charnan Lewis, Aubrey Ingmar Manson, Aline Mare, Kelly Marie Martin, Lilly McElroy, Brooke McGowen, Tom McLaughlin, Alyce Haliday McQueen, Siofra McSherry, Memoticon, Mother Art, Mehregan Pezeshki, Minna Philips, Jennifer Pilch, Melissa Potter, Alison Pirie, Mary Anna Pomonis, Ali Prosch, Fiona Quilter, Heather Rasmussen, Fay Ray, Cindy Rehm, Chelsea Revelle, Michelle Robinson, Yasamin Safarzadeh, Jinal Sangoi, Hannah Scott, Safi Alia Shabaik, Peggy Sivert, Frances Smokowski, Felís Stella, Allison Stewart, Kayla Tange, Celeste Voce, Danielle Giudici Wallis, Rebecca Waring-Crane, Susan J. White, Elizabeth C. Wild, Julie Zemel

Cover image: Karin Crona