EXHIBITIONS: MISSING CONTEXT LONG OVERDUE

Artists Allison Rowe and Nancy Nowacek are tired. The artworks of “Missing Context Long Overdue” explore media portrayals of women and femme bodies and the artists’ deeply intimate experiences with fatigue. Through their work, the artists provide some of the ‘Missing Context’ observed by scientists Alana M C Brown and Nicole J Gervais, who call for the advancement of sex-based sleep disorder identification and treatment approaches and whose work serves as inspiration for the show’s title.

Women’s and femme fatigue is supposed to be private. Our suffering is not given credence; rather, it is a state of gendered being that doesn’t warrant attention or empathy. Rowe and Nowacek make their private encounters with fatigue public through photos, mono prints, paintings, and videos.

Rowe’s experiences of pregnancy inspired First Trimester (2018-2019), a series of text-based watercolors in which Rowe is trying to make sense of the host of unanticipated physical experiences emerging in early pregnancy, the most intense of which was fatigue. The birth of her daughter provoked a biological state of restless vigilance: from anxiety about her daughter surviving the minefield of warnings sewn into infant bedding (Soft Threats, 2019) to trying to build mathematical frameworks to optimize her daughter’s rest every day—and thus her own—(Nap Math, 2019-2021). Mummy Reads the 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report (2022) depicts a new modality of caregiving fatigue: that of a mother attempting to examine the future world her child will inhabit while tending to her toddler in the present.

Meanwhile, Nowacek’s suite of works emerged from four years of living with Long Covid, her ensuing daily battle with chronic fatigue, and its emotional shading of worthlessness, failure, and hopelessness. In (To Give A Name And Equip With Arms, 2023-2024) a cast of femme characters that kept Nowacek company during the first 6 months of her illness when she was so exhausted, the only creative act she could muster was to capture the flickering images of the television on her phone are transformed through mono prints. The exhaustion of living as female—forever contorting to conflicting social norms—and more time on the sofa watching television inspired the structural film of found images of prone women like her (Improper of Men and Animals, 2024), and text-based descriptions of them (Scenes From An Illness, 2024). Resting Drawings, 2024, in which Nowacek lays on top of a paper-cloaked mattress, making marks as she adjusts and readjusts for comfort, indicate the beginnings of acceptance with the slippery invisibility of fatigue.

Nowacek’s broadsheet, Missing Context Long Overdue (2024), excerpts critical lines from Brown and Gervais’ paper “Role of Ovarian Hormones in the Modulation of Sleep in Females Across the Adult Lifespan,” a concrete poem of gendered rage, and its covert a call to arms: “WOMEN, FEMMES, and GIRLS: IF YOU’RE NOT SLEEPING, DON’T TAKE IT LAYING DOWN”.