Someone recently asked me why I called women "goddesses," wondering whether we were preaching some sort of female supremacy. This was incredibly surprising for me because any sort of supremacy is the total opposite of what we're about. I realized that he had us confused with 70s Goddess spirituality movements. With all due respect to those sisters, that's not even close to what we're about at The Goddess Factory.

We are about the empowerment and self-determination of everyone-regardless of race, religion, gender, nationality or sexual identity. We happen to focus on women and pop culture because that's where our expertise and self-interests lie.

Q: What do you make in the Goddess Factory? A: Using pop culture, we make people feel free to discuss the undiscussable.

The name The Goddess Factory is in part inspired by Andy Warhol as I am intrigued by his sense of self-invention. In my world, goddesses not only have names like Athena, Venus and Oshun. They also have names like Keisha, Nicole and Sarah. I started developing my pop cultural goddess mythology with a hip hop play that I wrote in my early 20s named Goddess City. The concept of hip hop theater did not yet exist. I had to argue with people that it was musical. The play won recognition from the two opposing fronts of feminism Ms. Magazine & Cosmopolitan Magazine. This who I am to a degree, un-apologetically: Ms. plus Cosmo.

My films are all hip hop films, regardless of the content because I make my films by any means necessary and draw on the myths that abound in many cultures to do so. In this way I am continuing the tradition of samplin(g), much like a DJ does by giving new purpose to old songs. Like any hip hop artist, my work is about many things. All of my work discusses the un-discussable. This is hip hop.

Of course, this is not without controversy surrounding the issues of self-representation and who gets a voice. When I was shooting the documentary Knives in My Throat about a courageous African American woman dealing with mental illness, self-abuse and drugs, black people pointedly questioned my decision to air this dirty laundry. Like David Lynch, Spike Lee and Stanley Kubrik, airing dirty laundry, shining a light in dark corners, is a critical part of why I make art. With the documentary Taboo, a look at interracial love, a multiracial watchdog group called and demanded to know the content, seeking to insure a film of solely positive representations. Similarly, the violent black male character in Ophelia's Opera was criticized in the way that The Color Purple & for colored girls were critiqued for showing 'negative' black male portrayals, although black women were pleased to finally see certain stories told. A new issue in representation arose in making the comedic sexual odyssey Alicia in Wonderland when my dominatrix advisor demanded certain revisions in the script to insure that her people would not be misrepresented.

I aim to present women as subjects rather than just the objects of someone's projected desire or fantasy. This is inherently problematic not only in Hollywood but among some vocal African Americans who almost see any talk of womanism or feminism, which to me could actually just be called humanism, as treasonous.

I am Afro-Guyanese American - all people with a tradition of call and response: loud, interactive people. When Goddess City was Off Broadway, I thought that predominantly white audiences did not ‘get it' because they were so silent during the performance, until they jubilantly rushed up to me afterwards. I want people to yell at the screen. That's why I also give motivational talks in person and for free download online. I want women to take up more room in the world and to have an outrageously good time while doing so.

COME PLAY WITH ME...
xoxo,
Abiola

Down The Rabbit Hole
by Wangechi Mutu, Artist

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll

How to represent with candor, lyricism and bodacious befuddlement a world of shattered mirrors and hyper self-conscious female machismo?…enter the world of Abiola’s invented romances. Inside every peephole she presents to us an image of our own voyeurism and a myriad of regal yet self-effacing belles. One finds themselves following these characters on the precarious and illusive path that leads to a little rabbit hole….
But to where?

‘What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive’
Sir Walter Scott

Abrams leads us into her universe of fragmented narratives and disjointed realities. Existing on the same plane, serving adulterously divergent roles, they produce no predictable solution and yet add to the complex web of questions that we have about sordid relationships, supernatural powers, racial myths, fantasies of romance and hidden violence.

‘Art guarantees sanity’ Louise Bourgeois

Image can illicit simultaneous urges of empathy, ambivalence, desire and mortification? Is creating an ameliorative process? Abiola’s visions of vagrancy are soaked in the language of self-healing and auto-therapy. Her philosophy and Goddesses are reminiscent of a mind’s attempt to defeat its own nightmares and color-saturated confines through invention and masquerade. Abiola’s vagina dialogues inhabit the attic of a house cluttered with the costumes and wigs of females whose experiences cause them to shape shift between insanity and lucid behavior, creating pseudo identities and imploring the help of enchantresses with telekinetic powers to help unravel the trap that is their shared predicament.