Acts of birth, potency, and impotency mingled are what I’m passionate about. The to-be-in-the-process of writing or drawing. There is no end to writing or drawing. Being born doesn’t end.
—Helen Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts
My interdisciplinary practice moves between the genres of drawing, performance, and video. My works focus on symbolic images and performative actions that address the complex relationship between the female body, representation, and myth. My projects are informed by texts drawn from printed ephemera, literary criticism, and the history of women’s art and writing. These forms depict private and collective experience and allow me to follow multiple threads through aesthetic, feminist, and psychological readings.
I employ the use of fragmentation, marking, and repetition to develop visceral manifestations of female narratives. The beautiful and the grotesque mingle as figures contort against the boundaries of their somatic limits. The works are intended as fluid texts that move between interior and the exterior experience through small gestures that have been repeated and ritualized. The serial nature of my work emphasizes the intimate relationship between the part and the whole, and reflects the symbolic resonance contained in the obsessive action.
Cindy Rehm is a Los Angeles based artist and an 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. She is the founder and former director of spare room, a DIY installation space in Baltimore, MD. In 2021, she launched Hexentexte, a collaborative project at the intersection of image, text and the body.
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.
contact: cindyrehm@gmail.com