An exhibition by CamLab will open at the University of Houston Libraries this month.

UH student at Reguarding Room workshop, remaking Gracie Holtzclaw’s Rape Culture painting from 2014. Image courtesy of CamLab.

The Reguarding Room exhibition emerges from an ongoing project of CamLab, an artist collaboration between Anna Mayer, assistant professor of sculpture at UH, and Jemima Wyman, a Los Angeles-based artist. CamLab facilitated on-campus workshops at which participants remade feminist works of art from history about rape and sexual assault, in miniature. “With contributions from UH students as well as members of the Houston public at large, the exhibition makes visible various kinds of labor, from the work of artists whose paintings, sculptures, performances, and installations are being reproduced, to that of the workshop attendees who painstakingly study the originals in order to capture their spirit, to the work of all who experience or witness violence and attempt to keep it in the realm of the visible,” Mayer and Wyman state.

In 2015, CamLab developed the experimental, horizontal strategy of bringing people together on the topic of sexual assault while engaged in a hands-on activity. The workshops allow for non-confrontational expression without being tied to any individual narrative. The miniature artworks crafted in the campus workshops are exhibited in a to-scale model of the Rothko Chapel, one of Houston’s most prized landmarks, to insist on the importance of rape and sexual assault as subject matter, and to propose that the spiritual aims of the Chapel could expand to include radical care for those targeted by patriarchal violence. Both an homage and a question, CamLab’s proposition asks viewers to use their imaginations to consider a different way of being embodied.

An opening reception will be held on April 10 from 5-7pm at the MD Anderson Library. The exhibition will be on display through May 31.

Reguarding Room‘s iteration at UH is supported through the Innovation Grants program of the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts which is funded in part by Houston Endowment. The project is also supported by the sculpture program at the UH School of Art in the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts.