In La Petite Peen Presents, multidisciplinary artist Jess Pope brings her original stage performance into the context of a gallery for the first time, weaving together new layers of meaning through performance and an immersive installation that unapologetically navigates concepts of identity, gender, feminism, and domesticity.

 

Fusing various forms of visual art and performance, this exhibition embodies the artist's internal philosophies through the caricature of Petite Peen, a mystical, curious, clown-like creature. The performance, which combines drag, clown, dance, and theatre, takes the audience on a thought-provoking and humorous adventure into Petite Peen's life as they explore the many dualities of life.

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This iteration of La Petite Peen Presents expands this narrative through various craft-based works and found objects. Pope transforms the gallery into a domestic space furnished with a vintage sofa, a television set, and a dining room. She interrupts the room with a sprawling yarn installation, a manifestation of society's overwhelming expectations of women. Visitors walk through hundreds of tentacle-like woven threads, each one representing a mental note, task, reminder, or responsibility that comes with being both a caretaker, artist, and individual and the pressure to keep track of every aspect of life. She continues to challenge this notion with an accumulation of receipts and to-do lists interspersed with family mementos, notes from friends, and imaginative childhood drawings hung on lace and sheer curtains. She pins the joys and hardships against each other, balancing the amount of work and attention motherhood requires with the value this identity brings her. In this exhibition, she proposes queer mothering—a nurturing act, the labor of love, self and
community care—as opposed to the gendered prescription of motherhood.

 

La Petite Peen Presents introduces essential questions about our roles in society
and encourages others to join the artist in embracing alternative ways of being.

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