Think monochromatic living rooms made of gray walls, furniture and floors, a look that's become popular with people in their thirties. The "Clean Girls" who live in these spaces inhabit a world where flyaway hairs are illegal and plain linen clothing is the epitome of fashion. At least, that's what the Internet wants you to believe.
"I think we all want to be a person who fits in and feels welcomed into spaces and relates to people easily," McIntosh says, adding that she tried unsuccessfully to take on some of the characteristics of the "Clean Girl" aesthetic — it just didn't fit into her lifestyle, and she noticed other women struggling with it, too.
"When I would visit their spaces," she recalls, "I would see this messy clutter, this gross, gooey amalgamation of things, and it would feel beautiful to me because it's something that would describe them, something that would tell me a story about their lives in a really intimate way." As a result, she started to feel more at home in her own clutter amidst all of the trinkets she collects from antique and thrift stores.
And thus, Girl Goo was born. Opening March 1 at Bell Projects, the show celebrates the multifaceted nature of girlhood, especially the messy parts. It invites people into a world of unmade beds, strewn intimates and bowls of rotting cereal — a world where clutter and chaos are not shameful, but beautiful.
Themes of shame (and owning that shame) still play a role in the show, however, especially for one of the nine participating artists, Julie Puma, whose piece is a pink shag rug sculpture surrounded by old letters and photos of herself and her ex-lovers, some of them nudes. "I took a lot of naked pictures of my boyfriends in my twenties and some of them are of me in more promiscuous poses or really made up," she says. "I think this piece is also about shame and owning that shame as a way to not be ashamed."
There's a lot of shame in today's society — both on social media and in public — and as an activist and ally for the transgender community, Puma says she hopes that people realize "that we don't need to be afraid of our bodies, our sexuality, things that we might've done to cope."
Puma's mother died when she was six, and she says the loss led her to act out sexually and seek attention from men, even at a young age. She remembers sitting on her sister's pink shag rug and watching her with her boyfriends. "This piece is about exploring that uncomfortable, kind of icky coping mechanism as a journey to a more useful healing state," she adds.
While the exhibition is about being messy, each piece is still a carefully crafted work of art. Puma says she had to put a lot of thought into the placement of the clutter in her piece, keeping artistic elements like changing scale, repetition and balance in mind.
Some of the photos are small, while Puma blew up other images. "A lot of my work is built with memory," she notes, "and I liked playing with that oscillating idea that memories can come forth and be big or they can disappear, so I made some of the Polaroids really big and then kept the small ones in there as well."
Girl Goo is part of Denver's Month of Photography, a biennial festival that celebrates the art of photography through public exhibitions, and Puma's piece isn't the only one with a nude photo element. Jillian Fitzmaurice's contribution includes nudes of herself turned over. "It's like, here's this but you can't have it," McIntosh says.
There's more than photography here; Girl Goo is a true multi-media exhibit. Moe Gram took all of her old lingerie from a past relationship, spread it over a canvas and painted over it. Kate Gonda made a 3D dry clay device that in another world would be used to hold your hair back when you're puking alone after a night out. "There's a beeswax mold of a dresser drawer that touches on the early 1800s when women would collect things for a death drawer — all these things that they wanted to be remembered for after they died," McIntosh adds. "I think women do that even now."
"There's a beeswax mold of a dresser drawer that touches on the early 1800s when women would collect things for a death drawer — all these things that they wanted to be remembered for after they died," McIntosh says. "I think women do that even now."
Kiera McIntosh
On Saturday, March 29, McIntosh is planning a ticketed event called "Goo Revue," which focuses on the intimate spaces of girlhood and what women do alone in their rooms, whether it's singing, dancing or crying. "I have performance artists coming out and they'll be playing in the space with a DJ at the end," she says.
Curating the show helped McIntosh feel less alone in her thoughts about being messy and not fitting into the mold that is currently the trend. "It's such a special situation to be able to go about feeling something so deeply and sharing it with a collective group of people who feel it as well, and being able to play with that vulnerability and share it," she says.
Themes of childhood play another big role in the exhibition. The whole show is kind of like a love letter to her eight-year-old-to-nineteen-year-old self, McIntosh explains, and how in childhood girls often do crazy things without worrying that they are weird, gross or not socially acceptable. "So we just do it; we cut the hair off our Barbies and dunk them in the toilet," she says. "We just play and have fun. I wanted to think about the creativity that happens in those messy spaces."
Girl Goo is about being messy as a woman, too. "I present as a messy person," Puma admits. "I'm refined in my job, but sometimes I'll come in a little bit like a wrecking ball and it's uncomfortable for people because I'm so upfront and out there. But when I put it into art, somehow that makes it more acceptable, like I'm not acceptable but my work is. And I just want to be like, 'Look, we are all messy, really.'"
And that's what McIntosh hopes people get out of the show — that they can romanticize their own mess, have fun and play in whatever situation they're in. "Whether it's aesthetically pleasing or not, it's all a reflection of our lives," she concludes. "Life is super messy and that's okay."
Girl Goo opens Saturday, March 1, and runs through April 6 at Bell Projects, 2822 East 17th Avenue, and includes art by Heather Link-Bergman, Nicole Cassidy, Amber Cobb, Casey DeBie, Jillian Fitzmaurice, Kate Gonda, Moe Gram, Kiera McIntosh and Julie Puma. Learn more at bell-projects.com/exhibitions/girl-goo.
