Good Woman — Shelby Rodeffer

Shelby Rodeffer - Louisville, Kentucky

August 2018

Dimensions: 20x30"
Acrylic, enamel, and mirror on silk with lucite dowel and fringe.

The Grand Exhibition of the Pre-Vinylite Society: An 18th Century Revival is a contemporary signwriting exhibition that directly references an exhibition of signs that took place in London in 1762. The original Grand Exhibition of the Society of Sign Painters opened on April 22, 1762, on Bow Street, Covent Garden. The exhibition was a satirical display of pictorial signboards, some painted specifically for the show (purportedly by William Hogarth) and some taken clandestinely from the city streets in the aftermath of a sign ordinance that required all projecting signs to be removed.

One of the few surviving objects from the 1762 exhibition is its companion catalogue, which playfully and often facetiously describes the pictorial signs for the 18th-century viewer. For The Grand Exhibition of the Pre-Vinylite Society, the artists work directly from the 1762 catalogue to translate the historic descriptions into contemporary lettering and pictorial styles. Participating artists each interpreted a description from the original catalogue by lettering it verbatim, rendering it pictorially, or by utilizing both lettering and pictorial skills

Along with the title, "Good Woman," the original catalogue also included a drawing of a Victorian woman with no head, with the date 1764 enclosed in a frame above her.

For a 2018 "good woman," I imagined a powerful, hairy, stretch-marked woman, finally rid of her whalebone corset, holding a flaming labrys in one hand and Donald Trump's severed head in the other. Her might has cracked open the ground to bring the natural world forward. No woman is faceless, and a small mirror insert gives the viewer an opportunity to see oneself in the scorned woman’s face.

Photo by Emma Delavante.