HYENA: CAPTURING THE SHAPE-SHIFTERS

A NEW, SMALL-PRESS ART BOOK CELEBRATES AND CONTRIBUTES TO THE LEGACY OF WOMEN ARTISTS’ SURREALISM

by Sarah Fensom, brutjournal’s U.S.A. West Coast bureau chief

Like the art and writing it celebrates, HYENA is a hybrid kind of production. This sleek, 128-page publication intersperses short-form essayish texts regarding the history of Surrealism created by female artists with contemporary poetry and enigmatic forms of writing, illustration, collage, and photography, as well as images of objects and sculpture. They all evoke and build upon the legacy of Surrealism, an enduring mode of art-making and an aesthetic-theoretical attitude about the forms art may take and the character of what they might express.

Cover of the new book HYENA, published by Hexentexte, an enterprise its founder, the Los Angeles-based artist and educator Cindy Rehm describes as “a collaborative project at the intersection of image, text and the body.”

HYENA’s roster of 80 Los Angeles-based artists and writers includes, among others, Deborah Meadows, Amina Cain, Larkin Maureen Higgins, Adele Bertei, Jen D’Mello, and Danielle VonLehe. Their text and image-based productions explore a multitude of long-prominent Surrealist themes, such as animality, shape-shifting, eroticism, ritual, and the examination of one’s inner life.