Rebecca Goyette - "Ghost Bitch U.S.A."

Rebecca Goyette "Ghost Bitch U.S.A."
July 14 – September 11, 2016
Freight+Volume is pleased to present Rebecca Goyette’s new solo exhibition, Ghost Bitch U.S.A., opening July 14th and running through September 11th. For her third solo project with Freight+Volume, the artist will present a multi-media exhibition including two new films along with performances, sculptures, and works on paper.

Rebecca Goyette’s video and multidisciplinary work reflects her complex view of sexuality, specifically the notion of fantasy from a feminist perspective. This progressive point of view and her penchant for the bizarre are apparent in her artistic practice, which involves embodying a broad range of characters in an ongoing series of psychosexual scenarios, acting as both director and protagonist in the two Ghost Bitch films. Her latest alter ego and the catalyst of this exhibition is an apparition of her ancestor and namesake, Rebecca Nurse, a witch hanged in Salem. Witch by day and dominatrix by night, Goyette’s character connects America's barbaric beginnings with her own personal trauma of a childhood spent in smalltown New England, culminating in a satirical lampooning of contemporary political turmoil.

In Ghost Bitch: Arise from the Gallows, the Ghost Bitch character engages in erotic historical role-play. Shot on location in Salem and in collaboration with modern-day witches, Goyette inhabits the archaic stereotypes of an accused witch: the hysterical, hyper-sexual seductress, luring Puritan men into the dangers of the wilderness.

Ghost Bitch U.S.A. is another mythic fable, again following our heroine as she and her supporting cast of characters rectify paternal betrayal, alluding to modern politics and personal trauma, possibly ensnaring a certain Presidential candidate with purportedly “small hands.”

In conjunction with the films, the artist has created drawings, sculptures, and paintings inspired by Goyette’s personal and ancestral psychological history, pulling directly from her films. The magical objects, costume pieces and fragments from both Ghost Bitch films are presented on a monumental, fully-functioning altar to be activated in a participatory ritual on July 22nd from 6-8 PM led by Demetrius Lacroix, a member of the Ghost Bitch cast and spiritual advisor from Salem, MA.

Rebecca Goyette received a BFA from RISD and an MFA from School of Visual Arts. She has exhibited widely in NYC and internationally, including solo shows at Freight+Volume, NYC, Arts+Leisure, NYC, Airplane Gallery, NYC, NY Studio Gallery, NYC, Jersey City Museum, Jersey City, NJ and Galerie X, Istanbul, Turkey with group shows/performances at Whitney Museum of Art, Queens Museum of Art, Weisman Museum of Art, MN, Winkleman Gallery, NYC, Stux Gallery, NYC, Slag Gallery, NYC and Gallery Poulsen, Copenhagen, Denmark. Her work has been featured in Vice Magazine, Art F City, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, NY Arts Magazine, Whitehot Magazine, Posture Magazine, Bad at Sports and Slutist Magazine, amongst others. She completed residencies at DNA Summer Residency, Provincetown, MA, Offshore Project, Kardamyli, Greece, Greenwich House Pottery, NYC and Byrdcliffe in Woodstock, NY. Goyette is also a lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art and has taught/lectured at Cooper Union, Montclair University, Eyebeam and The New School.

Please join us for the opening reception with the artist on Thursday, July 14th from 7 to 10PM. Refreshments will be served.