Sleeping Beauty works the night shift

Women have always worked, in fairytales as well as in real life and this exhibition of cartoons is all about women’s dreams, the reality they face each waking morning, their wants, their contradictions, the road to emancipation and the laziness that comes with freedom. The “ language” used is both humorous and satirical, the set-up exciting and theatrical and the argument extremely topical.
“ I started work when I was small, just like one of the Seven Dwarves, but instead of searching for diamonds, I was looking for comic books and verbal and practical jokes”. So says Pat Carra, the ironic Lady Ambassador of women’s battles for freedom, and this exhibition brings together the protagonists of her cartoons to tell us about the ups and downs, ins and outs of life as a woman.
Sponsored by the City of Rome’s Department for Streamlining, Communications and Equal Opportunities, this exhibition is both frank and yet all embracing. At times one stumbles across a particular sketch, others are spotted from a distance and one is drawn towards them. The way the exhibition is laid out deliberately avoids imposing a particular route or even a particular interpretation of what is being viewed. People, images and thoughts are given free reign and the prints seem to be floating like butterflies, light as a feather and although there is a decidedly humorous vein that runs through the show, it also has a vaguely hypnotic effect.
Pat Carra has created a sort of personal observatory that allows her to look inside herself as well as what is going on around her and to relay what she sees by putting pen to paper. She observes her fellow women with enthusiasm and affection: their lives, how they change, their relationships with men, their burdens, frustrations and their triumphs too. From her vantage point in her observatory, she has been watching the up-hill battles women still continue to face and the changes they have wrought in the workplace for some last thirty years.
Many of her women are not shown as icons seeking freedom; she prefers to show women in all their many guises and for this exhibition at least, they have been divided between the seven rooms that make up the exhibition.
Pat Carra does not use her irony to depict herself or her own life, saying " It takes two to laugh or smile and the hope" that the other person will understand and share your opinion. And when you make fun of a woman to her face, it actually means that you are establishing a relationship with her, acknowledging the validity of her expressed desires and ambitions.
Her sketches of career women highlight the paradox created by the issue of equal opportunities. When her subject is someone seen trying to emulate her male counterparts, Pat is being satirical about emancipation and type-casting. That said, when she is depicting women in power, she is always careful not to fall into the trap of portraying them as eccentrics with male characteristics or as cruel super-women either. She believes that “the power held by women in the workplace is extremely complex to pinpoint in that it takes on a maternal, omnipotent character and incorporates a sprinkling of emotional blackmail”.
Most of the messages delivered by this “Lady Ambassador of Cartoons”, are born of the conversations with her friends from the Woman’s Bookshop in Milan that has been her political stomping ground for some 30 years; a combination of gossip and philosophy, political analysis and stories about their state of mind. They are relationships that actually provide her with something akin to a full-time education, a sort of happy circumstance that could be defined as her “ cartoon mine”. And if it is true that “it takes two to laugh”, then the “Sleeping Beauty works the night shift” exhibition at the Centrale Montemartini might well be the place to go for a healthy, collective guffaw as you come across the ironic sketches that are born from observations and reflections.