The Girls and Guns Artists' Collective examines popular examples of the sensationalized power struggle between men and women and depictions of the women who fight back. The artists who form the collective all straddle the worlds of business and art by being both influential arts administrators and notable visual artists in their own right. As a collective, all of the artists use humor to critique and celebrate the dual role of the warrior woman. Our collective strategy maintains the 'do-it-yourself' spirit of independent cultural producers and the new synergies that can be formed with artists who are also arts administrators.

Google Girls or Heroines and Weapons of Distraction
by Nina Czegledy

This installation consists of photo collages and a looped video. Google Girls and Heroines invokes the iconography of luscious female warriors searchable by Google on the Internet - weighing them against the heroic female parade of socialist times. Whether these heroines conform to market-driven capitalism or politically correct socialist ideology, they reflect figments of masculine imagination.
In reality the tools and methods of frequently underground female dissent have often been highly unorthodox, ranging from the subversive stitch of medieval embroideries to gunslingers on the Net.

Medusa: Super Mum by Sheila Butler

My work reclaims and reconfigures Medusa, a flexible super-heroine, born long ago and recently revived as a power symbol in feminist art and theory. A drawing installation in painted and embroidered fabric and paper, titled ‘Reclining Medusa’, presents a seductive Medusa in her boudoir. Three large drawings on the wall form a visual context for Medusa in her bed. These drawings depict maternal Medusa with child as a Super-Mum; 'TV Medusa' in which she appears on a TV screen threatened by a gun; and a large semi nude Medusa with marginal images of armed conflict. This last work borrows its title, 'Face-Off', from the sport of hockey, Canada's favourite macho pastime.

Shooting the Shit by Paola Poleto

'Shooting the Shit' consists of a series of snapshots depicting individuals or small groups in park-like settings. The feeling of the event (of standing around talking casually, and of snapping the photograph) is casual, social. Individuals were asked to turn around, bend over, and effectively, I 'shot/got the shit'. This series builds on an earlier series developed for 'Girls and Guns' depicting women captured in similar compromised positions, while in their offices and/or places of work.

Miss Mouse and Miss Teapot Trading Cards by Sally McKay

Miss Mouse builds on her extensive Fight Club research into gender and violence to take on the topic of 'Girls and Guns.' This time she's got company, as community outreach activist Miss Teapot joins the fray. Together, the scantily clad duo pose for action packed trading cards employ sex and violence as a means of illustrating basic human powers.