The Art to the Art of Resistance
UPRISE 2025, Untitled Space, New York
by Chunbum Park, March 19, 2025
Reisha Perlmutter "Perceived Reality II," 2024, Oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches
At a major exhibition at the Untitled Space, titled UPRISE 2025, 100 artists of diverse backgrounds make their voices heard, experiences re-lived, and visions felt as women, people of color, artists, and activists. The exhibition was curated by Indira Cesarine, the gallery founder, who arranged the works in a salon-style presentation. The show opened on March 8th, International Women’s Day, and celebrates the 10th anniversary of the gallery’s founding.
The artists address important issues such as women’s rights, body, immigration, racism, and LGBTQIA+ experiences. They are convincing because many of them have gone through and own those very experiences. The works are born from a life lived and philosophy accumulated through repeated acts of resistance and eventual triumph.
​
The works of the 100 artists are very diverse and attack on numerous fronts. Generally, the exhibition could be divided into works that attack or tear down the subject out of rage or defiance, and art that celebrates or builds up something, out of love or positivity. Alison Jackson, for example, ridicules Trump and Musk for their pro-MAGA and anti-DEI deeds and words, through their works of staged photography of lookalikes. On the other hand, Joanna Pilarczyk presents loving paintings about body, intimacy, and embrace in LGBTQIA+ and interracial contexts or relationships. The works could also be categorized as personal, universal, or both. For example, Jemima Kirke’s “Girl in a Pink Room” (2006) is an oil painting that is simultaneously personal and universal in meaning. The painting depicts a young blonde-haired and blue-eyed girl smoking a cigarette, highlighting the struggles of adolescent people.
​
UPRISE 2025 poses several interesting and also difficult questions. How do the artists sublimate or transform their rage against the status quo into expression as art? Or rather, how do the artists maintain their composure while engaging with ideas and visions that enrage them? Does an artwork concerned with identity and politics become an illustrational tool for those ideas and experiences, or can the work develop its validity and authenticity by expressing those ideas and experiences less directly without necessarily illustrating them? (Or is this a necessary aspect of political and identity-based art?) Is the increase of fracturing in our socio-political landscape becoming unbearable? And are we seeing a multitude of chasms or bubbles, which lock each of us into our identity cliques and deny the opportunity for empathy and communication between the different groups? Are we (the artists in the exhibition too) in a way, intentionally or unintentionally, trying to own the discourse surrounding our identity, almost like copyrighting or trademarking, so that people of other backgrounds have no voice or say regarding identities that are not of their own? And, finally, is it a problem when the book cover contains all or most of the content within its surface? In other words, does it suffice to convey the idea or the message of resistance in a literal fashion, or should there be more steps or layers in the work?
Jocelyn Braxton Armstrong - "What We Carry," 2023
Terracotta, Glaze, Wax Pigment, Mica Fragments, Glass Beads, Silver String
18 x 13 x 4.5 inches
A part of us truly wishes to believe in all the works and respect the magnitude of the experiences and struggles that the artists reflect on through their artmaking. Experience is a euphemism for traumatic and violent events, and they must be resolved through the acts of healing and self-expression. Linda Friedman Schmidt’s being born in a Holocaust displacement camp and now using discarded fabrics to make a self-empowering self-portrait as a queen is no easy tale or feat. Kate Hush’s reference to the visuals of the printouts from the early women’s suffrage movement in her work titled, “No Exceptions” (2025), is a heavy symbolism in and of itself.
​
However, certain works in the exhibition reflect a particular trend in contemporary art that may spur second thought and a closer examination. As previously suggested, some art in the show appears to do away with complex layers of symbolism and meaning, thereby becoming illustrative tools for the sociopolitical message or idea. Without singling out any artist or work, the example can be given that an artist who is anti-MAGA may depict a burning MAGA hat or make art consisting of a partially burnt MAGA poster. This would be a case in which the book's content aligns or matches the book cover, metaphorically speaking. Furthermore, the entire content of the book is contained within the surface of the book cover, thereby eliminating the necessity of opening the book itself. This goes against the idea of investigating truth in (modern and contemporary) art and philosophy, that what appears on the surface can be deceiving, and the truth must be excavated through many layers and the multitudes of reversal of relations.
​
The universe is incredibly mysterious and unknowable. What we think we know, we don’t truly know, and what we think we don’t know we already innately know without initially being able to articulate it. In a rather simple analogy, racist thinkers have often equated light skin with beauty and affinity towards light and, subsequently, information and truth. However, we all know that light skin reflects the most light away from itself, thereby appearing lighter in value. On the contrary, dark skin will absorb the most light and be internally filled with light. Then we know that the racist thinking was indeed a falsehood and a myth, and there is no correlation between skin color, light, truth, and (physical) beauty (if beauty can be understood as a visual manifestation of truth and divinity as suggested by Neo-Platonism in 3rd century AD). This is the kind of discovery and investigation of the truth, based on many layers of information and meaning, in addition to the multi-layered inversions of relationships and notions, which is particularly necessary for contemporary art. This is the only way that art, whether contemporary, modern, or traditional, can be conceived and understood as fine art (which has depth and serves a particular aesthetic purpose differentiated from utilitarian functions or illustrational aims). And it should be sincerely argued, without sounding haughty or pretentious, that fine art should differentiate itself from illustration, craft, or cartoon, which are traditionally understood to be flat in terms of meaning, utilitarian in terms of design, or overly reliant on technique (rather than content or the philosophy).
Sophia Wallace - "Swan Series (Black Opal)," 2022
Glazed Stoneware, 13.5 x 14.5 x 7 inches
Wallace's work is especially intriguing due to its surrealistic and psychological nature, in which the female genitalia's anatomical map manifests as a fluidic sculpture. In some ways, her metal sculpture exists in an alternate dimension, separate from and conjoined with our physical world. The object follows an aesthetic logic that is greatly warped in terms of space, time, and perception and is more curvilinear than our own. Imagine an alternate universe in which each object exerts greater gravitational pull per mass, and everything pulls one another in a weirdly warped space-time geometry. In this kind of (psychologically and physically) distorted space, up and down would be either both up or both down, depending on how the spacetime fabric warps; in addition, the easy binary opposition between the up and the down, culture and nature, and the male and the female, which is permitted within a Euclidean geometry, would be impossible under such an environment.
​
In a similar concept, Reisha Perlmutter's oil painting achieves a powerful figurative abstraction of a portrait of a lady in a curvilinear fashion, which is the implied aesthetics of femininity from the curves of the woman's body and persona. The figuratively abstract portrait is a negotiation between the lady's hair, the surrounding space, and her presence and power over the surroundings, further amplified by the lush hair. The hair becomes infinitely thin but also numerous threads that attack and master the air enveloping the feminine head and upper torso. Like Medusa with many snakes coming out of her head, the woman's hair exerts an incredible force of beauty, power, and grace, which cannot be tamed or subjugated by any regressive ideology. In this work, the curvilinearly abstract language of the figure suggests an entirely different physics or cosmology in which the lady is situated. One can imagine such a condition for the universe before the Big Bang, in which more feminine and curved, alternate versions of everyone and everything may have already existed. In this state, the universe is immensely curved, and the ups and downs can point towards the same direction, which too defies the binary opposition of the more rectilinear Euclidean geometry (in our current universe).
​
Without going on without end, we must pause and gather our thoughts regarding this major, landmark exhibition of resistance at the Untitled Space, which is symbolic and meaningful on myriad levels. It is clear how Cesarine curated the exhibition with such a strong conviction and passion reflecting her beliefs about progress, the status quo, and the potential of art as a powerful vehicle for protest and resistance. At a time when transgender women are being labeled as men, women are denied the right to abortion, and immigrants are being imprisoned and deported left and right, the exhibition serves as an important occasion for the resistance. In our democratic world, where the regressive and undemocratic forces are resurgent, the artists must lead the march of progress. We must gather, speak, and be heard.
​
Perhaps criticism concerning some of the works in the show, that political art without deeper layers, reversals of discovery can become literal illustrations for those political ideas, is trivial or misguided. In the current circumstance, the urgency of the political and social issues may push artists to create in this rather direct fashion. Criticism may be valid from an aesthetical, historical, and philosophical standpoint, there is an art to the art of resistance.