Control: Juvana Soliven
July 14th - September 9th, 2023
A year ago, Roe v. Wade was overturned by the US Supreme Court.
Control. Control over our bodily autonomy, our rights toward self-determination, our gender expression, our narratives — control over what is inherently ours is under attack.
This exhibition features works from Soliven’s Body Weaponized series — amalgamate forms of the censored body, medical implement, weapon, and trap. Censorship, much like our bodies, relations, and genders, may also be weaponized. It has both the power to protect the privacy and humanity of those vulnerable to scrutiny and the power to render perverse and profane what ought not to be. The censor is interrogated through the tedium of craft practices — beading, metalsmithing, enameling, sewing — as a meditation on labor and the endless work needed to fight for what is ours.
Body Weaponized is displayed in conversation with new work that continue to examine the constraints of gender performance under the effect of patriarchal violence — offering a mirror against societal views on women, the trauma inflicted, and how far we have and haven’t come as a society.
Revisit the Artist Talk
Artist Bio:
Juvana Soliven is a visual artist and educator from Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Soliven’s work subverts and utilizes object languages to speak to issues regarding intimacy, labor, trauma, and women’s positionality within the patriarchal system. Soliven holds an MFA in Metalsmithing at Cranbrook Academy of Art (2016), a BFA in Sculpture at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (2013), and studied Art Restoration and Conservation at Lorenzo de’ Medici International School in Florence, Italy (2012). Soliven is a Lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Chaminade University of Honolulu. Her work is in the collections of Cranbrook Art Museum, Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, as well as in private collections. Soliven has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Netherlands, Germany, and Iceland.
