BmoreArt

“We’ll plan shows as a collective to other satellite spaces, but we won’t be using this space primarily to promote our own work,” Gill says. “A lot of our calls will be jury calls. There might be invitationals, there might be curators that are invited by one of the members, or there might be juried shows where the member invites someone to jury a show on their behalf. We do have funds for stipends and things like that built into our model. The goal is essentially for it not to be an echo chamber.”

Feral is a diverse show with some powerful works, including Katie O’Keefe’s darkly beautiful “Idle Sacrifice”, a portrait of a simultaneously free and tragic floating woman made with embroidery, handmade paper, and thread used in a painterly way. You’ll step around Heather Ossandon’s sewn-together domestic ceramics, Maika Jarrow’s wounded mask sitting on scattered bones and moss, and Trisha Kyner’s startling nude sculpture.

Many of the pieces distort or combine bodies, like Phyllis Mayes’s animal-woman hybrid pastels and Caitlin Gill’s sharp “Chicks as Tricks” collages, which combine colorful eroticism with naked chickens. “I’m trolling the ‘boys will be boys’ mentality, the idea that if there’s nudity men can’t control themselves,” she laughs. Ann Margaret Morris has an energetic and sharply realistic charcoal portrait of a decomposing wild forest scene, Jacqueline Yvonne Tull and Bridgette Guerzon Mills have pieces that play with found wood, opening it in unusual ways, and Sarah Magida has two sculptural works combining fabric, rope, felt, and beads. There are many more, with humor and lightness throughout the show along with flashes of horror. It’s a strong debut from a promising group.

Beyond the art, the most striking thing about talking with Goxxip Girl Collective members is their commitment to a collaborative structure and their sense of shared planning and purpose. They’re in this to support one another and it shows.

“It’s all about lifting each other up in the community and being excited about what everyone’s making,” says Katie O’Keefe, a recent Baker Artist Award finalist. “I think it’s been a lot easier to be seen working together as a collective.”

Each member of the gallery will take turns curating shows, according to Gill, but this first show is a bit of an anomaly, as the gallery’s focus in the future will be on exhibiting work from outside the group.

Gill says the group has been applying for grants but the gallery is currently self-funded by its members. “We’re going to continue to be sourcing income through whatever means possible, but right now we’ve put our own money into it. So we pay our rent by dividing it up between the twelve of us, and we all pay dues that go into a pot, and from that pot you can pull a certain amount for your exhibition.”

“There’s a lot of mentorship involved in this group,” adds Gill, who notes Goxxip Girl members range from established Sondheim Award semi-finalist Alyssa Dennis to new artist Maika Jarrow, who has her first gallery appearance in Feral. Gill emphasizes the collective has an open-door policy to new members and is welcoming to non-binary and transgender artists.

“It’s kind of like choose-your-own-adventure,” she says. “It’s very fluid, you can come in and out at your leisure. You can be involved in critiques or you can omit yourself from critiques, you can come to meetings, you can not, but you’re still invited into the community or into exhibitions if you choose to stay opted in to the group in any capacity. We’re really big about sharing resources; we share grants with each other, we share opportunities with each other. When you leave college you don’t really have that art community; you become kind of isolated to your studio practice. This is a way to create a community that you can use post-academia.”

“But having passed through a formal art education is not a requirement,” adds Jacqueline Yvonne Tull, a collective member who’s also an Interdisciplinary Sculpture Studio Manager and Metalworking Instructor at MICA. “That’s the nice thing about being able to share resources and collaborate; it doesn’t fall all on one person to do the administrative duties or supply the funding or all the things you’d be doing if you were trying to do it on your own. We’re still working on divvying up roles among each other so that everything isn’t all on the one person who’s curating a show that month. We’re all sharing our time and skills and resources—maybe someone has more graphic design skills, or social media promotion or whatever it might be, that we can help each other both financially and time- and skill-wise.”

Tull notes the group is currently “largely white-presenting, but we’re mindful about it.”

“We talk about it openly now,” says Gill. “We had the first group photo and we were all like, ‘ew’. It is cringe-y, but the bottom line is that we’re not out there trying to check a box; we want people to come to this space because they want to be in this space, but people don’t even know we exist, or know this is a space people can enter at any point in their artistic career. Diversity, equity and inclusion is something we’re all worried about. We’re in Baltimore City, it would be a complete oversight to not be sensitive to that. It’s hard to do that authentically, without being performative, and that’s the goal—to act genuinely.”

When the opportunity of a new space opened, the group jumped at the chance.

“We got this off the ground in like 2 weeks,” Gill says, snapping her fingers. “It was wild. We had to be in here by September first, hard stop. Were we prepared to be in here by September first?” She laughs. “Remains to be seen. But we pulled it off.”

“Feral” is up in the new XoXo Gallery on the 3rd floor of the MAP building at 218 W Saratoga Street through the end of October, with a closing reception on Oct. 19th. The next XoXo show will be curated by Goxxip Girl Collective member Ann Margaret Morris; it will be her first show as a curator. Look for the group show “Brumation” at Creative Alliance in December.