Opening Reception: February 10, 4- 7 pm
Keepsake Gallery. 1127 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn

Who Gets to Be a Horse Girl?” is an interactive ceramic installation that delves into the question, “Who gets to pursue horse riding and ownership as a hobby?”  Inspired by a family tragedy involving a horse this past year, the work contemplates disturbances that stand in the way of our oneness with nature.  A colorful toy plastic horse or a cowboy hat conjures certain fantasies in us as kids, but as we grow, few have opportunities to ride a horse, and still fewer become a horse girl. Is the desire to be a horse girl inherently fraught with consumerist colonial fantasy? The divine child within us finds nature without conquest, able to fulfill their dreams through love. Community care allows us to imagine, decolonize hobby spaces, and work together through our personal and collective grief.

The interactive floor-to-ceiling ceramic installation features equestrian marionettes, a tear-stained sun, and a large-scale work reimagining mother nature/Gaia/Pacha Mama as a verdant hill replete with the natural elements of earth, sky, river, and sun. Her body becomes the container for feminine trauma, a site for horse girls in precarious positions. Around the base of the sculpture, shown low to the ground, are bowls of teardrop-shaped paper for people to create drawings and text to express hope and release sadness. The teardrops become part of the installation. As the eye moves upward, we see whimsical horse girl marionettes, a fantastical clay horse, lightning bolts, the sun, fluffy cotton clouds, and tiny teardrops all tethered from the firmaments with colorful silky cords.

Rebecca Goyette opens the narrative of this immersive world to Artshack’s students, (ages five to seventeen), and adult artists with developmental disabilities from LAND Studio/Gallery. This colorful patchwork grid resulted from prompts including family, personified animals, characters, and nature-based imagery to tell stories.