Micah Lexier

*Keep the IS in FEMINISM* is a collection of new Feminist slogans commissioned for the Contemporary Art Gallery’s street front vitrines. For this project we invited prominent feminist artists along with emerging artists both female and male to “reinvent the ‘f’ word: feminism,” a directive taken from the renowned New York artist and activist collective Guerilla Girls.

Faith Ringold’s “Woman, Freedom, Now” from 1971 still has a resonant tone, but its sense of urgency has waned. We wanted a new round of slogans to capture that original urgency by inflecting the very notion of Feminism back into a contemporary conversation. It’s not only that women are under represented in politics and over represented as objects, it is that women, young and old, no longer identify themselves as feminists. Even with the best of intentions there has been a slow fading of “feminists” as we watch them slide into the history books.

In the last two years there has been an active looking back to feminist art practices of the 1970s. Two prominent references include the traveling block buster *WACK: Art and Feminist Revolution*, which was at the Vancouver Art Gallery. WACK elicited numerous responses from local artists and galleries such as Centre A’s *TentEvent: Generating Exchange* and Artspeak’s *Persistence: An Archive of Feminist Practices*. Also, Frieze magazine’s 2007 feminist issue gave a detailed look at historical feminist work as well as featured new activist practices. Renowned art critic Lucy Lippard declared at  *The Feminist Futures* conference at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2007 that “we’ll be post-feminists when our goals have been met, and not before.” The return of Feminist discourse to the contemporary art table is not a surprise: the time is ripe to pay new attention to this now forty year old practice, to rejuvenate the terms of feminism to better understand what it has effectively achieved and lay out what still needs to be done.

The title of the exhibition was taken from the list of new slogans and is by Winnipeg-based writer, psychoanalyst and performer Jeanne Randolph. Sixteen slogans were displayed over two months. From November 21 to December 21, 2008 we featured slogans by Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, Hadley + Maxwell, Randy Lee Cutler, Kelly Mark, Micah Lexier, Myfanwy Macleod, Isabelle Pauwels, Jeanne Randolph, and Martha Wilson, and from December 22, 2008 to January 18, 2009 we featured slogans by Kate Davis, Dave Dyment, Kristina Podesva, FASTWÜRMS, Kelly Mark, Jeanne Randolph, and Elizabeth Zvonar.


A street view of the CAG window spaces, which are painted pink and each contain a large poster with large black block text. 

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Two large fliers are installed in the CAG’s window spaces. The flier on the left mimics CAG’s circular-shaped logo. It says FAG, Feminist Art Gallery. The other one is also a text-based work.  

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Three large fliers are installed in the CAG’s window spaces. They are all text-based works showing slogans such as “Pheminism is Phat.” All the walls behind those windows are pink. 

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This photograph depicts one of the CAG window spaces. Behind a glass window on a pink wall, a large white filter is mounted. The flier says FAG, Feminist Art Gallery in black block fonts. 

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Kate Davis, Dave Dyment, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, Hadley + Maxwell, FASTWÜRMS, Randy Lee Cutler, Kelly Mark, Micah Lexier, Myfanwy Macleod, Isabelle Pauwels, Kristina Podesva, Jeanne Randolph, Martha Wilson, Elizabeth Zvonar

Keep the IS in FEMINISM

*To Be Sorted: Blank/ Circle to Square/ Organizing Principle* is a series of three consecutive vitrine displays with objects from the collection of Micah Lexier, with each display accompanied by one of the artist's works.

Lexier, a Canadian artist based in New York, has developed his practice out of a reconsideration of the quasi-documentary strategies of early conceptual art, retooled to accommodate his concerns with time, identity and difference. Lexier has a sustained interest in the ephemeral products of conceptually based practices and over the course of the past twenty years has amassed an extensive collection of such materials. He's also collected hundreds of anonymous products that share similar graphic and aesthetic qualities. The individual objects in the collection come from a wide variety of sources and include a large number of coins, printed materials such as stationary, score cards and books, artists' books and multiples, packaging, tools, magic tricks, and most recently, fragments of perforated cardboard found in the street.

Micah and I have selected three separate groupings of material from this diverse collection. Our selections and the rubrics under which we've organized them are somewhat arbitrary, since our choices were motivated primarily by pleasure, by the particular satisfaction derived from an object that is smart, beautiful, economical, communicative and still manages to retain some mystery of purpose or style. We trust that the categories that we've devised will be recognized as merely convenient, imposed after the fact. Each group is accompanied by one work by the artist which obliquely demonstrates some of the reciprocal qualities between the work and the collection. It should be noted that the works were selected after the fact as well, as just one of several possible examples of the ways in which Micah's artistic practice is informed by his collecting habits.

-Christina Ritchie


Detail of artworks by Micah Lexier. In a display case, a variety of objects such as postcards, magazines, and notebooks are placed.

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An installation image of artworks by Micah Lexier. A variety of objects, such as photographs of the blue sky, postcards, and magazines are placed in a display case. 

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An installation image of artworks by Micah Lexier. A variety of objects such as postcards and magazines are placed in a display case. A drawing that looks like a graph is mounted on a wall.

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Detail of artworks by Micah Lexier. In a display case, a variety of objects such as postcards and photographs of the blue sky are placed. 

Micah Lexier

Exhibitions