Advice for Young Women: A Work in Progress

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Lori Weidenhammer & Peter Courtemanche, They will expect you to clean the dinosaurs, 2000, colour photograph

This exhibition consists of a series of photographs which offer advice to young women. Mimicking the typical posters that teenage girls hang in their bedrooms, these images offer advice that is by turns entertaining, disturbing, affirming, foreboding, banal and uncanny. As critical neologisms, they are more useful for contemporary women than the pin-up tropes: remember "Hang in there!" with a soft-focused kitten in a sock? Taken last summer, these photographs depict the artist scrubbing the cement dinosaurs of Drumheller, Alberta. As a discourse on authority, identity, and psychological conflict, these images "clean" the dinosaurs (authority) out of the artists' past and memories, replacing them with cogent responses overlaid as texts. This exhibition is the third installment of the series Saskadiaspora, a homecoming of Saskatchewan artists.