Amanda Ross-Ho and Kirsten Stoltmann have known each other for 10 years. They are currently based in Los Angeles and work in the same studio building. Vaginal Rejuvenation is a rarefied and specific presentation – a conversational project using their proximity and access to one another as a framework. Their longstanding friendship and points of convergence is in effect a particular strand of history, and the artifacts from this unconventional timeline are directly referred to in the work on view. Rather than simply a collaborative exhibition, it is a presentation of two individual practices that use response and appropriation as a primary medium.

In Stoltmann’s tableaus pornographic imagery, stock images from American culture, and other dark possessions assume a position beside the decorative objects that are usually given pride of place within the home. Ross-Ho’s installations have taken craft processes such as macramé and crochet to a monumental scale with large wall hangings and interventions into exhibition walls that dismantle modes of presentation. For both, the typically sentimental overtone of domestic arts is reformed into a dark comedy with a message of transgression. Through collage, installation and photography, their shared visual vocabulary is aimed at the implications of gender in relation to creative production. A dynamic barrage of imagery and information that explicitly and/or discreetly evokes femininity subverts traditions of materiality, the display of objects, and the use of empowered language. At the same time they confront the negative connotations of a maladjusted focus on the feminine, with the objective to re-invent.

Stoltmann and Ross-Ho chose to utilize the appropriation of themselves as a way to acknowledge regional perception, both in terms of their role as women and LA artists. Their cannibalization of residual, promotional, or ephemeral materials, in some cases literally ‘vandalizing’ or repurposing pre-existing artworks made by one another creates an uneasy but good tension. Embedded critiques of another and their working methods emerge to complicate the notion of collaboration, and point to the problems inherent to any form of partnership. Although the exhibition reveals an intimate exchange between two peers that is humorous and self-reflexive, it is more “about” ideas of collaboration, friendship, and a reactionary aesthetic, than actually embodying these things.