Tecate, Mexico-based artist Irma Sofia Poeter will open a new solo exhibition on Saturday at Bread and Salt. The show, "New Man: A Woman's Gaze," is a study of gender, as well as an imagining of a new form of masculinity — one that's vulnerable and stripped of what Poeter refers to as the "violent gender binary."
While gender has informed her work throughout her long career, the seed for this current exhibition began in recent years.
"When the pandemic started, I started questioning my role as an artist. If I wasn't able to do art, then what would I be doing? I started questioning also the infrastructure in which we live, and how everything is so male-oriented, and that's why the Earth is in such a bad place — because there isn't this balance between the feminine and the masculine," Poeter said. "I started thinking about this, and that's where the idea of 'New Man' came."
Poeter, a 2016 San Diego Art Prize recipient, is a textile artist, and her background is rooted in fashion design, both in study and in family history. Textiles also inherently inform her gender-based work, and vice versa.
"When I was very small, I used to hear stories of my grandmother and how she would make these beautiful dresses, made out of this fabric that she would find — very inexpensive — and she would create these beautiful garments, and everybody marveled about it," Poeter said. "For me, fabric represented this material that could do magic."
In her artistic practice, Poeter reframes a misconception that textiles are traditionally seen as a woman's domain, or a craft rather than art.
"It takes women's activities and women's actions, and takes them to another level. What I'm doing is creating pieces of art within this craft definition, and it's a way of putting women on a different level," Poeter said.
'The phallus is in repose'
In "New Man: A Woman's Gaze," the works in the exhibition range from embroidered suits installed on mannequins to classical-looking tapestries with sewn-on male reproductive organs — each adorned with lace, beading or sequins. The inherently feminine material and texture choices Poeter made are wrapped up in each piece's significance.
The adornment of the phallus, as well as its state is also one of the ways Poeter's work aims to reimagine masculinity.
"It's an iconic art. You see this all the time, you know, usually it's erect. In all the pieces of 'New Man,' the phallus is in repose. And the idea behind all this is that I think we as not only men — the society is really geared into being like, very doing things, very goal oriented. Just do this, your goal, your ambition, you have to be very focused. And I think that just by being, just by having no agendas at all, just being yourself … just enjoying the moment of the present, that is what I wanted to express with the phallus in this condition," Poeter said.
The term "the male gaze" is generally attributed to scholar Laura Mulvey, from her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" ("Screen," Volume 16, Issue 3, Autumn 1975): "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly," Mulvey wrote.
Generations of not just gender standards and constructs could be ascribed to this male gaze. When Poeter turns this around to be the woman's gaze, there's a gravity and seriousness of what it implies, but there's also something a bit playful.
The woman's gaze
"Throughout history, woman has been the object or the subject to be gazed upon, and I think that when you are in that position, you are open, obviously, to be looked at," Poeter said. "There's a kind of vulnerability, also. You're vulnerable because you are being watched by somebody. I think that that situation has not been very much in the men's experience, and I think it's interesting to put him in that situation, too."
She said that exploring the woman's gaze is a way of finding permission and the power to look uninhibited but instead with joy. Poeter also noted that for models, she starts with images from the internet — which means a lot of adult websites.
"So I have to go through a lot of porno sites to get the photograph that I get inspired from. So also taking the image from that context and putting it into this other context, there's a transition, and there is a change also that I really, really liked about the process," she said.
Poeter said that art plays a powerful role in attempting to disrupt gender constructs, because it brings insurmountable issues to a more comprehensible level.
"When you look at a piece of art that talks about something like a gender issue and it talks about it through beauty, and it talks about it through art and through colors and through textures and through all of this, it permeates into you on a very subliminal, other level," she said.
'Like a wound.'
Raised on and around the U.S.-Mexico border, Poeter lives in Tecate now, on the edge of Cuchama, a sacred Kumeyaay mountain also known as Tecate Peak. This mountain, the geography and landscape as well as the actual metal border fence is woven into her work, as well as her actual home, which she built herself.
Poeter can see the border out of her window, its presence undeniable. "It just cuts through the mountain. It looks like it would be like a wound," she said.
Poeter uses the Spanish term "autosufficiente," to express what she referred to as a form of masculinity; in some ways her experience of this part of the border and her self-sufficient home life is also woven into her study of gender.
While her work has been shown around the world, Poeter said it's primarily been in Mexico and Europe. "For one reason or another, very few times in the United States, which I found a little bit curious. But I'm the kind of person that whatever my work takes me, that's where I go."
The show at Bread and Salt will run Saturday, Feb. 12 through Apr. 24, 2022.
