Justine Kurland opening for SCUMB Flowers at Dashwood Projects

In 1967 the radical feminist and writer Valerie Solanas sold copies of her newly authored SCUM Manifesto on the streets of New York’s Greenwich Village. Solanas didn’t mince words: the ambition of the Society for Cutting Up Men, or SCUM, was to eliminate the male sex and work toward an all-female utopia. Inspired by Solanas’s vision, Justine Kurland began to purge her cherished library of photography books authored by white men, creating her own SCUMB Manifesto in the process (SCUMB stands for Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books). Seeking and picturing freedom is at the core of much of Kurland’s work, and in this project, liberation is found in the artistic act itself. She chopped up images by figures whose work is considered foundational to photographic history, as well as those by their contemporary male heirs, then reconfigured them into collaged compositions. The nature of collage—heterogeneous, disjointed, shape-shifting, cyborgian, fantastical—has long made it a feminist strategy both in life and in art. Kurland’s is a restorative ritual: each collage is a reclamation of history, a dismemberment of the patriarchy, and a gender inversion of the usual terms of possession.

To create this new work, SCUMB Flowers, Kurland excised every flower from the pages of William Eggleston’s ten-volume set, The Democratic Forest. Freed from his compositions, the blooms dangle from webbed vines, delicate and lacy. SCUMB Flowers locates the latent feminine in the work of one of the most resourced and collected American photographers, a man who is quoted to have based his compositional style on the Confederate flag.

Ariana and SCUMB Flowers, a zine by Justine Kurland and Ariana Reines, has been published on the occasion of the exhibition and will be available for purchase. Reines will present a reading of her poem “Theory of the Flower” at Dashwood Projects on October 5th.

Justine Kurland is an artist based in New York City. Her most recent publications are This Train (MACK, 2023); SCUMB Manifesto (MACK, 2022); The Stick (TIS, 2021); and Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures(Aperture, 2020). Recent exhibitions include This Train, Higher Pictures, Brooklyn (2024); SCUMBManifesto, Watershed Art & Ecology, Chicago (2023); and Bonds of Love (with Moyra Davey), delpire & co, Paris (2023).

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