Ebb & Flow: Exploring the Womanhood Continuum
Frank Gallery
601 City Center Way Pembroke Pines FL
Group show curated by Sophie Bonet & Zee Pamela Lopez del Carmen
November 21 2024 - February 22 2025
Opening Thursday November 21 2024
https://www.thefrankgallery.org/

Curated by Pamela ‘Zee’ Lopez Del Carmen and Sophie Bonet

Exhibiting Artists:
Amanda Covach, Amy Gelb, Ana Albertina Delgado, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, RPM Projects, Ivonne Ferrer, Lisu Vega, MaiYap, Marina Font, Pinar Sinka

Ebb & Flow: A Multidimensional Exploration of Womanhood at The Frank C. Ortis Gallery
The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery will host the Opening Reception for Ebb & Flow: Exploring the Womanhood Continuum on November 21, 2024, from 6-9 PM. The exhibition will be on view through February 22, 2025.

Curated by Pamela ‘Zee’ Lopez Del Carmen and Sophie Bonet, Ebb & Flow features eleven artists exploring the fluid, evolving concept of womanhood. The exhibition navigates personal, political, and cultural intersections shaping women’s lives through various mediums. Artists engage with themes of memory, resilience, the body, and ritual, challenging societal norms while celebrating the transformative power of art.

A key artist in the exhibition is Coralina Rodriguez Meyer. Her Linea Negra series, including Phara From Pharaohs Miramar Diptych and Yemaya Broken Water, connects motherhood to broader cultural struggles. The Linea Negra—a dark line on pregnant women’s bellies—serves as a symbol of life’s cycles and societal pressures on women’s bodies. Her work addresses reproductive justice and environmental degradation, drawing from her Andean and Caribbean heritage to explore resilience and resistance to colonial legacies. Welcoming and warning viewers into a tropical Foliage Obscura retablo installation, Cenote Yemaya: Aquifer Intrusion offers a turquoise sanctuary of works from artist Coralina Rodriguez Meyer's Mama Spa Botanica workshop. Seeking maternal refuge preserved by material refuse in domestic textiles and construction materials; a series of documentary sculptures and photographs guide the viewer through a saltwater underground railroad intruding into Miami's geopolitical aquifer. Conceived by marooned matriarchs from 16-19th century colonial plantation labor systems; the safe passage is an apparition within the immersive installation documents the evolving habitat and reproductive health botanica leaders today. Matriarchs' interdisciplinary advocacy work resists the texture and complexion of the Castas system across genders, generations and geographies. Wading through a Virgen Gruta landscape, the viewer encounters a series of kinetic Mother Mold monument fertility effigies and Linea Negra photographs of endangered flora, families and activists who survive conflicting climate and reproductive health crisis in Florida. Transgressing the structural violence in American mythology, the works are a culmination of the resistance work cultivated in Miami.

Marina Font offers a more personal exploration of femininity with her Cycles series, a collection of 26 pigment prints that reflect on life’s cyclical nature. Inspired by her experience of abrupt menopause, Font’s work symbolizes fertility, loss, and renewal, using metaphors of light, shadow, and objects like cracked eggs to evoke themes deeply embedded in the female body. Influenced by psychoanalysis, Font’s art asks viewers to consider how unconscious forces shape identity.

RPM Projects, a multi-generational collaboration, contributes the immersive installation The House Inside My Head. This seven-segment video installation, set within a life-sized house with hair bursting from the attic, transforms the domestic act of folding laundry into a meditation on female labor. Hair, a potent symbol of femininity, represents the emotional burdens carried by women, making the installation a reflection on memory, ritual, and the invisible work that sustains families.

Through these diverse works, Ebb & Flow highlights the multifaceted nature of womanhood. Rodriguez Meyer’s Mother Mold series examines women’s bodies as cultural vessels, Font’s Cycles explores the rhythms of life and the body, and RPM Projects’ installation delves into memory and ritual. Together, these pieces illuminate the cycles of life, care, and transformation, encouraging viewers to contemplate the continuum of womanhood.

Ebb & Flow is a celebration of femininity in all its forms. By bringing together the works of Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, Marina Font, RPM Projects, and eight other artists, the curators have crafted a thoughtful exhibition that invites reflection on identity, ritual, and empowerment.

For more information, visit thefrankgallery.org

Installation images courtesy of Ebb and Flow: Exploring the Womanhood Continuum Exhibition, 2024, The Frank C. Ortis Gallery. Courtesy of the City of Pembroke Pines photographs by Dream Focus Photography