Nine Gallery

March 6 - 29

Zeinab Saab

Girls Just Wanna Lay the Smackdown

First Thursday Opening: March 6, 5 - 8 PM

Girls Just Wanna Lay the Smackdown discusses themes of nostalgia, gender roles, distorted memories and reality through the lens of professional wrestling from the late 90’s to early 00’s. What girl doesn’t want to have an extensive gel pen collection and give a Stone Cold Stunner to their sibling? Girls Just Wanna Lay the Smackdown pulls together a collection of works of gel pen tapestries on paper and woven silk screened prints to form a body of work that explores the nuances of girlhood. Like wrestling, girlhood is not a one size fits all idea or experience- it too contains moments of rage, disappointment, joy, tenderness and intimacy, heartbreak, and a wide variety of color and tapestry. 

This specific era within wrestling was chosen based on the connection I have with it from childhood. Growing up in a household of brothers made it confusing for me to understand what the role of a girl is supposed to be, since I wanted to be “in the know” or accepted by my brothers as someone they can play and hang out with. Although we didn’t have much in common, wrestling was that one thing as a child we looked forward to as siblings every Monday night. It did not matter whether I was a girl or not, chances were I was still going to receive some iteration of a frog splash before going to bed. It too was a space where we didn’t care about separating “what is for girls” and “what is for boys”. This allowed wrestling to be the great equalizer in our household. Girlhood was not the stereotypical doll collection and talking about boys- but if it was talking about boys, the only boy I cared about was the Heartbreak Kid himself- Shawn Michaels. 

Within Girls Just Wanna Lay the Smackdown, dynamics are important as are the choices of color- these are the elements that define the wrestler. Colors not normally found within nature, play into the ideas of the artificial constructs and theater that is gender play. The brighter and unnatural the color is, the more we are meant to believe the wrestler is “dangerous”. Although the visual patterns aren’t referencing anything specific, their role is to distort and use repetition as a metaphor to highlight the cycle of storytelling that exists within wrestling. Each wrestler has an opponent that goes through a similar arc within their story- there’s always a babyface (good guy) and a heel (bad guy), that are either friends or tag team partners, and at some point a betrayal takes place. Since everyone’s story has its similarities, the patterns for each image are different for each character, but the idea of repetition remains unbroken. 

Silkscreen prints show moments within this era that played on the boundaries of sexuality, gender, patriarchy, and in some instances race and class, and how they were either pushed or reinforced. Wrestling symbolizes just how much gender is a performance on a grander scale, or in this case, in a squared circle. This notion that boys and girls have to behave and/or dress a certain way in order to be perceived as socially acceptable goes completely out the window within this sport. Wrestling culture reveres men who are over the top and/or flamboyant (i.e. Ric Flair, Shawn Michaels, Seth Rollins, etc) and women are far from delicate and demure (i.e. Chyna, Lita, Rhea Ripley, Bianca Belair, etc.) goes to show how these binaries are nothing more than constructs that are in many ways determined by location. The tapestry inspired imagery symbolizes the distorted reality that is reflected back to us as a society - that this notion of gender and its roles are its own kayfabe - a teetering between what and when the performance and reality begin or end. 

Originally from Dearborn, Michigan, Zeinab Saab is currently based in Portland, Oregon, where they are a professor of art at Portland Community College. Their current work focuses on exploration of childhood nostalgia through color theory and the grid. Saab received a BFA in Printmaking and Drawing from Bowling Green State University in 2015, and an MFA in Printmaking at Northern Illinois University in 2019. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at The Sharjah Museum, Cue Art Foundation, and the San Francisco Center for the Book, among other venues. Their work is held in in permanent collections, including those of The British Library, The University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Emory University, The Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, the Arab American National Museum, and Zayed University.

Nine Gallery was founded in 1987 by nine artists interested in working periodically outside the context of the commercial gallery. It is an artist-run cooperative and is administratively and financially independent from Blue Sky, funded solely by its members. Each member of Nine Gallery is in charge of the gallery for one month each year. Usually members show their own work, however, they are also welcome to curate shows of other artists’ work. Periodically the members of Nine Gallery, present work together in group exhibitions, and at other times they collectively invite other artists to show. Beyond the general interest in creating a largely non-commercial exhibition environment with a minimum of bureaucratic and institutional structure, the members of Nine Gallery have no collective ideological program or philosophy.

To purchase a copy of Nine @ 25, a Blurb publication celebrating Nine Gallery’s 25th anniversary, follow this link.

Nine Gallery shares the same hours as Blue Sky.