A Formidable Daughter

A Formidable Daughter
Ann Hirsch
February 12th - March 20th, 2016

Hi Ann. I saw your art show. It was...wonderful. We liked it a lot. The paintings were very well done. Your dad and I are very proud of you--we told Grandpa about it. And he perked up when we were describing some of the different pieces. I was laughing when I told him about the chair. Yeah, the chair with the baby--what’s her name? Coopertone? Oh, Coppertone. No, I didn’t tell Grandpa about that part of it, he wouldn’t have understood. One thing dad was asking me, and I didn’t know what to tell him, was if it was supposed to represent our old house in Towson. No? Ok, so what does it represent? Ok, it doesn’t have to represent anything. But doesn’t all art...ok, I’ll stop, I’m just interested. Another thing was how you took those drawings and those old home videos from when you were younger and turned them into art. Well, because it allowed me to see them differently--I might have just brushed them off before. The idea of being a woman has always fascinated you. That comes through in all of the pieces. It made me think about how surreal childhood sexuality is, when you’re trying to know what it is to be a woman, or to be a sexual being, the darkness and messiness of that space comes through. Or how, as a woman, you have to grapple with an attraction to the way women are represented in images but also how false it all is. I can remember how your eyes would be glued to the TV and we could tell that you were thinking about these things. Even from a young age you were, what’s the word? Formidable. Well, we loved that about you. And, Ann, I saw that you had the video about giving birth to a baby, so does that mean that you’re thinking of...Ok, Ok, I’m sorry, I just had to ask.

Ann Hirsch is a video and performance artist who examines the influence of technology on popular culture and gender. Her immersive research has included becoming a YouTube camwhore with over two million video views and an appearance as a contestant on Frank the Entertainer...In a Basement Affair on Vh1. She was awarded a Rhizome commission for her two-person play Playground which debuted at the New Museum and was premiered by South London Gallery at Goldsmiths College. Hirsch has been an artist in residence at Yaddo, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Recent solo shows include MIT List Visual Arts Center, Smart Objects, Los Angeles, and the New Museum’s online project space First Look.