Lot 24: NIKKI LUNA

NIKKI LUNA B. 1977 UNMENTIONABLES Quantity: 20 SIGNED AND DATED FEB 2010 ON THE REVERSE OF EACH BOX LIGHT BOX, LACE, PLASTER RESIN 38.5 by 44 by 10 cm.; 15 1/4 by 17 1/4 by 3 3/4 in. (20)

Twenty guns made of resin and French lace. Since transplanting textile in the seventies from the domain of the craft/domestic art, to the culturally-valued male dominated fine arts, the material has since become a distinct element in the feminist art aesthetic. Nikki Luna capitalizes on this symbol, mixing her mother and grandmother's laces in the resin cast of a gun. She brashly combines the markedly female and male. That these lace guns come in glass boxes, all pointing to the left is not an accident. She unapologetically displays these conceptually repugnant fusions as specimens for observation. By doing so, Luna figuratively points back the smoking barrel to the feminists who wove this symbol in the mass psyche. She questions the inquisitors who have nobly fought, and are still fighting, for the woman's rightful place in the art world: why this symbol?

Her previous works follow the same thread. Luna fetishized the female body by distributing its presence in things it touched or thought—from bathtubs, broken casts, video installations, collages, steel signposts, paintings and textile. Doing thus, she managed to raise the question of the relevance of the female body to women empowerment if, ultimately, the body that is not present is the one that can never be owned: why this body?

By introducing counter-questions, Luna invites us to re-examine the processes and the system that has conditioned questions that gave rise to, case in point, feminism's "woman problem." These objects are Luna's tributes to Linda Nochlin's seminal essay titled "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? To which Nochlin herself answered, in a nutshell, that it is not the issue. The focus, rather, should be the question itself and the dominant male power elite eyes through which it was obviously viewed.

Rife with dialectics and conflicting symbologies, Luna's lace guns may not fire bullets but these are nonetheless piercing.