PROXY GALLERY is pleased to announce the exhibition MARLBORO PAD by New York artist Mary Louise Geering. Made in 1997 at the end of the 20th century, the found and painted object indicates a relationship to reframed time and obsolescence; biological, technological, and art historical. On the one hand the technology of sanitary napkins (no flaps, no wings) harkens to a pre-ipad time, when a pad meant a pad. On the other the Proxy gallery is at face level so that the object installed within it both figuratively brings the crotch “into your face” and also, by connecting menstruation and smoking, conceptually compresses the body.

Appropriation artist Richard Prince made his Marlboro Man [Untitled (Cowboy)] in the late 1980s and its auction sale for millions in 2007 made news in itself; thus when we look at Marlboro Pad the metonymic chain of signification takes us from pad to menstruation, to women, to men, to cowboys, to smoking, to advertising, to art, to money, etc. It also traverses the 1980s, the 90s and the 00s, with a detour both to Duchamp’s 1917 Urinal and to 1970s feminist art and the dream of a body as irreducible materiality. Mary Louise Geering short-circuits this chain by collapsing in one object pads and Marlboros; men and women, the genital, the oral and the visual.