Ana Navas

Donation Vases

Ana Navas uses humor to address formal, aesthetic, and societal conventions that are interwoven in the everyday through the normalization of gendered behaviors and style choices used to project personal and collective signifiers.

In her Donation Vases she uses quotes taken from corporate coach Lois P. Frankel’s book Nice girls (still) don’t get the corner office: Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers (2004). The aspirational, somewhat cynical tone of the sentences – “When given a choice, sit next to most powerful person, their power will cascade over you,” “Why is it that women buy those little chains to hang reading glasses around their necks,” “If you see your reflection on a glossy surface & notice something wrong, avoid fixing it there” – reveals a particular understanding of what a professional, ambitious cis woman should look like, the persona she should project, and the type of desirable behaviors that constitute a stereotypical “successful woman” according to a capitalist morality.

As a way to deconstruct these stereotypes, Navas offers this advice as “tips”- playing with the double sense of the word as counsel and gratuity – written on vases that resemble tourist souvenirs which would typically contain more naive rhetorics. The vases contain the tips “donated” by Frankel, effecting a displacement of the normalized, “universal” context they stem from and of the medium that carries them.  The oscillations between the universal/modern and the local, high art and popular craft are embedded in these objects that are completed by the drawings made with steel wire illustrating a material aspect of the sentences. They appropriate a modernist, succinct aesthetics in contrast with the handmade character of the ceramic pieces. This contamination of styles is a kind of postmodernist collage that reflects on gender and its multiple, subtle ramifications.