In Passing, a solo exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based artist Genevieve Gaignard, brings together several photographs made between 2015 and the present, mapping her ever-evolving performance of identity through large-format self-portraits and vernacular installations. Through an array of campy stereotypes that range from a suspicious housewife peering out a window to a Divine-esque drag queen, Gaignard interrogates her own intersectional identity as a biracial woman as well as the often murky, difficult terrain of race, class, and gender in contemporary culture.
Interwoven throughout the photographs are installations of everyday objects that confront viewers with some of the historical ways in which black female identity has been prescribed—as a mammy, a pin-up, or a ghetto girl. The malleability of t Genevieve Gaignard’s own physicality points to the nature of race and gender itself—something that can be put on and inhabited, a shifting collection of social constructs.
