Julia de la Torre

Feminine Architecture— Opening This Weekend

If you happen to be around Oakland, CA this weekend, you definitely need to hit up the opening night of Feminine Architecture— a collaboration between self-taught California-based artists & photographers Haley Golden and Nora Lowinsky.

Haley's selection reveals a sensitivity to the spontaneous theater of her surroundings. She finds her images waiting pre-composed out in the world, which gives them the feeling of being both surprising and inevitable. Her photographs uncover the many dramas, sometimes felt but rarely seen, of the visual elements that scaffold urban life; her landscapes are cinematic and spacious, but never lacking the humor that underlines her body of work— which ultimately conveys a striking range of emotion in the world of the inanimate.

In harmony with Haley's abstractions, Nora's chosen work explores the divine feminine through portraiture. She intuitively experiments with expired 35 mm color film, and hand-prints her own silver gelatin black and white photographs in her darkroom. Her portraits tell an unfolding love story with analog photography and a journey of self-exploration and catharsis through the female muse. Her art direction is spontaneous by design, revealing ethereal representations of feminine energy to address the collective unconscious of the subliminal woman.

The exhibition, opening on January 20th of this year through to early March, is a testament to their friendship and its role in nurturing the growth of their individual and complementary visions— It is broadly a celebration of women supporting one another in the arts with the hope of building a community for female voices.

The artists consider their work and mission especially relevant in the dawn of Trump's presidency, a time marked by uncertainty and disturbing misogyny. “Although the event was scheduled months ago, when the reality of a Trump presidency was unthinkable” Haley and Nora noted, “its coincidence with the inauguration weekend is powerful. Feminine Architecture urges us to acknowledge the female instinctual voice and vision.”