SPOOKY BOOBS – a collaboration between Amy Cannestra, J Myszka Lewis, and Maggie Snyder – will present a new series of work in their solo exhibition Girls Just Want to Have Fun at the Trout Museum of Art this fall. With their trademark humor, SPOOKY BOOBS challenges the internalized sexism and self-limiting beliefs taught through one of society’s earliest and most insidious avenues: games. SPOOKY BOOBS will debut their CROTCH line of faux games created through a feminist lens and exhibited through boardgame designs, packaging materials, and advertising posters in this exhibition. Girls Just Want To Have Fun will also feature new sculptural pieces and video installations created from repurposed toys and game pieces.

In this new body of work, SPOOKY BOOBS reimagines elements of games such as Perfection, Sorry, The Game of Life, and Barbie dolls to comment on how from an early age, female-identified people are encouraged to believe that a reductive set of pink-colored experiences is their only option for satisfaction in life. At the heart of the games chosen for this exhibition is the empty promise that female-identified people will win in life if they behave in a certain way or tamp down their expectations to fit a prescribed notion of a “model woman.”

The work examines the weight of social pressures, invisible labor, and double binds that uphold the mouse- trap of patriarchy in the workplace and at home. The games deconstruct how the patriarchy removes agency from female-identified people by insidiously convincing them to subscribe to and uphold the limitations society has established for them.

Since their formation in 2014, the SPOOKY BOOBS have mounted five solo exhibitions and have participated in several group exhibitions nationally. SPOOKY BOOBS was awarded this solo exhibition at TMA after winning the Best of Show at the 40th Annual SECURA FIne Arts Exhibition in 2020. Their work was also included in the 2018 Wisconsin Artists Biennial at the Museum of Wisconsin Art and the 2019 Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. They have been featured in MS Magazine and Brava Magazine. In addition, they have presented their work and on feminist activist art at the Women’s Caucus for Art conference and as visiting artists to Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, Wisconsin.