SCUMB (2019-ongoing)

In 1967 the radical feminist and writer Valerie Solanas sold copies of her newly authored SCUM Manifesto on the streets of New York’s Greenwich Village. Solanas didn’t mince words: the ambition of the Society for Cutting Up Men was to eliminate the male sex and work towards an all-female utopia. My collages, SCUMB Manifesto [the Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books], is an homage to Solanas and liberation found in the artistic act itself: I purged my personal library of photography books authored by white men. Historical figures who have become the foundation of the history of photography and their contemporary male heirs have been chopped up and reauthored as my own female imaginary. The nature of collage—heterogeneous, pulled apart, shape shifting, cyborg, fantasy—has long made it a feminist strategy in life and in art. Kurland’s is a restorative ritual: each collage is a reclamation of history; a dismemberment of the patriarchy; and a gender inversion of the usual terms of possession.