In the Gallery January 2025: Lynette Charters Exhibition
Exhibition: Jan. 2 – 31, 2025
Reception: Jan. 9, 5-7 p.m.
Read Molly Gilmore's review of the exhibition in Oly Arts!
Work from Lynette Charters’ Missing Women Series, Missing Parents Series, and Matilda Effect series will be on display in The Gallery at Tacoma Community College this January. Charters said that the Missing Women/Parents series springs from concerns she’s had since she was a student about the male gaze, a term popularized by film theorist Laura Mulvey.
“Back then I determined I couldn’t use the image of a woman to speak to her own purposes, so I resolved not to use this redacted imagery,” Charters said. “In 2017 I started making the Missing Women/Parents Series. It was before the #MeToo movement started by the wonderful Tarana Burke. I too had observed how little respect for women we have in our society, and I knew it was an important subject in need of exploring and discussing. I was concerned about bringing our kids up in a world I don’t feel safe in or comfortable with. Rigidly conforming to gender stereotypes is damaging for anyone of any gender.”
“The Missing Parents series,” Charters said, “is a response to experiencing and observing at-home parents, of any gender, struggle with the hardest job in the world unsupported financially or emotionally.”
“The Matilda Effect,” a term scientific historian Margaret W. Rossiter invented in 1993 to honor women’s rights activist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage, describes the social tendency to downplay women’s historical contributions and, in many cases, to attribute them to men.
“The Matilda Effect Series was born out of frustration that women’s achievements were less acknowledged, appreciated, or recorded outside of domestic or supportive roles,” Charters said. “With the Missing Series, I’d had fun pointing out the absence of the female/parent lived experience, but I needed to direct my attention more to speaking to the amazing things women have achieved in history. The Matildas are a response to the question the Missing Series poses.”
Charters says she hopes the exhibition will prompt people to think deeply about the imbalance in how society treats women and other so-called minorities. She noted that white men make up only 30 percent of the population in the United States, but their narrative dominates politics, the media, and how history is reported.
“My art is a playful but unflinching request for change,” Charters said. “I seek to give the 30 percent pause for thought, and the rest of us a clear voice and a place at the table.”