All the Women I Know presentation

Please join us for a collaborative presentation between Christine Hume and Laura Larson: “All the Women I Know, an archive of women in acts of resistance“.

About the presentation, the artists say: “Our project, which is excerpted in my forthcoming book, Everything I Never Wanted to Know, is an image-text collaboration that archives women in the act of resisting. The work consists of small scale black and white photographs alongside alongside profiles of women that emphasize the strangeness, lived affect, and queered angles that challenge conventional ideas of selfhood, narrative, and time. We like to think of the project as a work of speculative nonfiction or experimental documentary.

The photographs and the profiles document woman-identified persons known by us, captured turning away, troubling the promise of disclosure shared by portraiture. Our approach exploits collisions and misalignments between text and image to address how power and pain move through the body and the body politic. Our stacked litanies of image and text assert complex identities for these subjects, always variable, contingent, cumulative, exploring the tensions between the collective and the individual. We seek to inhabit and metabolize the limits of representation and legibility, the gendered scripts and postures available within patriarchy.  Our project takes account, on a human scale, of our connections and differences across intersectional divides and places our work in the feminist practice of connecting art making to daily life.”

Everything I Never Wanted to Know confronts two hated subjects in America: sex offenders and women’s bodies. The first section explores the national sex offender registry via intimate, local, and national perspectives, each drawing on the other to echolocate not solutions but a voice willing to complicate our ideas of justice and defend every human’s right to be treated like a member of the community. The second section shifts focus to the female body flickering between vulnerability and autonomy. Autobiographical narratives come in contact with extended riffs on Nike at Samothrace, the Frozen Charlotte doll, the Nylon Riots, and everyday acts of resistance that amplify the tensions between individual and collective experience. Cumulatively, What I Never Wanted to Know is a soft manifesto on sexuality, gender, whiteness, and violence.

Christine Hume is the author of a new collection of essays on sex offenders and women’s bodies, Everything I Never Wanted to Know, (Ohio State University Press/21st Century Essays Series, 2023) and a lyric portrait of girlhood, Saturation Project (Solid Objects, 2021), which The New York Times says, “arrives with the force of a hurricane.” Her three books of poetry—Musca Domestica, Alaskaphrenia, and Shot—earned the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, The Green Rose Award, SPD’s Best Book of the Year Award, and chapbooks have been published by Ugly Duckling Presse, Omnidawn, Essay Press, and PANK. Her collaboration with Jeff Clark, Question Like a Face (Image Text Ithaca) was named a Brooklyn Rail Best Nonfiction Book of 2017. Since 2001, she has been faculty in the Creative Writing program at Eastern Michigan University.

Laura Larson is a photographer and writer based in Columbus, OH. She’s exhibited her work extensively, at such venues as Art in General, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, Columbus Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, SFCamerawork, and Wexner Center for the Arts and her exhibitions have been reviewed in Artforum, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Time Out New York. Her work is held in the collections of Allen Memorial Art Museum, Deutsche Bank, Margulies Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Microsoft, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, New York Public Library, and Whitney Museum of American Art. Hidden Mother (Saint Lucy Books, 2017), her first book, was shortlisted for the Aperture-Paris Photo First Photo Book Prize. Larson organized a companion exhibition—the first to be devoted to this vernacular subject of hidden mother photography to be presented in the U.S.—which traveled from 2014-16 to Blue Sky Gallery, Palmer Museum of Art, Allen Memorial Art Museum, and Kennedy Museum of Art. She is the recipient of grants from Greater Columbus Arts Council, Ohio Arts Council and the New York Foundation of the Arts, and of residency fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Ucross Foundation. Her work is represented by Contemporary Art Matters in Columbus, OH. Larson’s second book, City of Incurable Women, was published this year by Saint Lucy Books. She is currently at work on a collaborative book project with writer Christine Hume, All the Women I Know.