Join us at She/They Gallery in collaboration with Grand Central Art Center to celebrate the opening of the Santa Ana Time Capsule during the Santa Ana art walk with featured artist Anita Enriquez and her exhibition, Systems of Romance.

OPENING RECEPTION: SEPTEMBER 7 from 5-9PM

THROUGH SEPTEMBER 27, 2024

In the exhibition Systems of Romance, Anita Enriquez asks us to reconsider the classical ideals of purity and permanence. Through sculpture and performance, the artist remakes, and re-stages aspects of contemporary life where these classical ideals are imbedded but invisible and pushes them to the point of logical fallacy - logico ad absurdism - and the social veneer falls away so we can see them for the fictions they are.

The artist says "My work is based on awkwardness and absurdity. On things we take for granted as necessary, even desirable, but if we had an objective view of them, we would have a good laugh at ourselves. I create extravagant, functionless gestures through sculpture or by playing the fool. Folly is a female allegory, and my preference is to explore these themes through the lesser-known histories of women and the spaces they occupied.”

This brand of absurdist feminism borrows heavily from the experimental art tradition where failure is embraced for the fact that it can often lead to more productive avenues of inquiry than the quest for perfection.

Systems of Romance is Enriquez's first solo exhibition at She/They Gallery and is comprised of videos and photographs made both for the camera and as documentation of performance work, as well as soft sculptures from her Folly series.