Yes Ma’am Projects is pleased to present Model Behavior, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Julie Henson, curated by Emily Ebba Reynolds.

Julie Henson makes sculptures, videos, and sound installations that examine gender, strength, and performance. Using imagery of iconic female archetypes from American popular culture–Miss Piggy, Dolly Parton, Tammy Faye Bakker, and Jonbenet Ramsey–Model Behavior explores how these famous characters both perform and reject, to absurd levels, societal constructs of femininity.

The work presented in Model Behavior reduce these hyper-feminine figures to their most notable features, adorning them with gender-coded materials such as feathers, satin gloves, fringe, and wigs. The combination of image and material reinforces the distance between myth and reality, further highlighted by the absent and unknowable physical body of these characters.

In Model Behavior, Henson transforms Yes Ma’am Projects into a directionless stage designed to perform identity, strength, and gender norms through the reexamination of these exaggerated and iconic cultural figures, who serve as extreme physical embodiments of femininity and complicated objects of desire.

Julie Henson was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Henson has had solo exhibitions at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, and the Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina. She has also participated in group shows including the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art, Los Angeles, the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, California, and the Visual Art Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Henson’s work has been featured in Elephant Magazine, Artforum, and Hyperallergic and she was a 2017 nominee for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Award.

Emily Ebba Reynolds is a curator based in Buffalo, NY. She is a Colorado native, and holds a BA from the University of Colorado Boulder, and an MA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is a founding partner of Bass & Reiner Gallery, an experimental gallery in San Francisco where she curated exhibitions with artists from across the US including May Wilson, Leah Beeferman, Jack Schneider, and Mie Mogensen. She is currently working on the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, a new art and education project space set to open in Buffalo in late 2018/early 2019.