November 18—January 07
39 West 14th, #308, New York
The show examines how artists express and challenge the notion of the body as politics, with a specific focus on Queer bodies and their identity formation, the Black and Brown body, bodies in religious cults, as well as body modification as a way of self-identification. The body can also be seen as a protective shell and a cyborg—a combination of human and machine. Two different approaches are used to highlight these themes: the method, which might be simply described as showing 'presence through absence,' presented in this exhibition, is an active dialogue with the 'exposed body.'
The work 'Not everything floats. I am trying to learn which parts of me to let sink.' (2022) by Antonius-Tín Bui is a portrait of Keekai, a Filipino singer and songwriter, in their own home. Their artist name is a reclamation of 'Kikay,' a slang term in Tagalog used to refer to someone who is sassy and feminine, often weaponized to bully men who insist on an expansive idea of masculinity. Much of the identity formation of Queer and Trans APIA folks is rooted in refusals, and the artist wanted to emphasize that through the hand-cut paper process. What remains of this singular sheet of paper are traces of the artwork, decorations, tattoos, and adornments that Keekai surrounds themselves with.
Hamed Maiye’s works speculate on the body as a site of spiritual and cosmic matter, referencing the beginning and end of life cycles. What does it mean to be a fallen star or perhaps a star rebirthed? Using found, owned, or nostalgic materials, the subtle use of image and assemblage creates a dialogue of material, memory, and the body.
The drawing by Debra Cartwright, whose mother worked as a genealogist, explores Black women's relationships to medical history in the United States.
Kevin Claiborne’s photograph is from a series of self-portraits taken during lockdown when he was in New York City during Covid in 2020. The title ‘Brightest Midnight’ is from a poem he wrote, thinking about how to find “light” or “lightness” in the darkest moments. It was a reflection of his mental state at the time and his reaction to external forces pushing him to go inward.
Felipe Baeza incorporates painting and printmaking to examine how memory, migration, and displacement work to create a state of hybridity and fugitivity. Baeza’s artistic practice aims to imagine structures and possibilities for the self-emancipation of the fugitive body, living in and persistently subjected to hostile conditions. 'I grew up surrounded by religious imagery in a very Catholic upbringing, where the body is central. I’m thinking about how the body is depicted and pushing that in many ways with materiality, considering how I can transform the body into different things,' said the artist*.
Xandra Ibarra is interested in what life underground sex activists and artists leave behind. She preoccupies herself with their debris—photos, clothes, documents, performances, and films. She believes that we maintain intimate relationships with the dead when we engage with their debris.
In the series 'A Scarlet Mouth Dawns' (2023), Ibarra photographed Carol Leigh’s ephemera in an attempt to keep alive Leigh’s spirit and her legacy** as one of the historical figures of the 1970s American Sex Worker’s rights organization COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics). Carol Leigh was a friend and icon to many and credited with coining the term ‘sex work’ a little over 40 years ago. The selected photograph, ‘Be With Her,’ offers a glimpse into Leigh’s personal life—an intimate view of her gazing back amorously at her lover.
Through urban intervention, material transformation, and intergenerational exchange, Nicolo Gentile's 'Hold on Me (Cable Flyes)' (2023) reinvests a former site of ritualized communion, bodybuilding, and cruising with its erased and omitted historical narrative. As the artist remembers the beginning of this series of works: 'I wanted a piece; a little harmless something by which to commemorate 12th Street Gym. It was a small length of metal, an aluminum railing. It floated there in the lamplight, unearthed from the rubble, a witness to the demolition, its burnished surface interrupted by a scrape from the backhoe.'
There are two works by Tamara Santibañez in the show. The painting 'Landscape I (Summit)' (2016) is part of the initial series of leather landscapes. These works are painted from photos of Tamara’s own leather jacket, a relic from the teenage years. By reproducing them as larger-than-life forms divorced from their whole, the artist situates them as terrains for the viewer to contemplate and as a meditation on material, while mapping their own body through the shell of the unworn item.
Employing porcelain glazed to appear as bronze, the sculpture 'Cluster' (2023) insinuates absent wearers of BDSM collars. Joined together by a triad of leather sections tooled with roses, the center puts the shape of a chest harness in a relationship with hostile architecture and the assumed permanence of metal fixtures, touching on the fragility of interconnectedness.
In Giulia Crețulescu’s ‘The Gazing Object’ (2023), eight elements constitute the circular shape of the work, representing a series of deconstructed pieces gathered from safety harness designs. These designs are typically used to cover and protect the body, especially the spine segment of construction workers or climbers, safeguarding them from shocks or accidents. The designs are based on an economical shape that embraces the anatomical part of the body needing the most protection in certain working environments.
The initial identity of the objects is dissolved into a new entity that only alludes to the original reference. The emerging textile object, with its divergent vectors pulling from the center of the work toward the outside, configures the previous functional elements into more decorative structures reminiscent of ancient bas-reliefs. The play of light and shadows on its surface volume deteriorates the functional identity of the object, which now silently gazes at the viewer from its new totemic identity.
The work engages in questioning the different types of relationships of immersion between the body and the ergonomic object and the body and the artistic entity.
Carlos Casuso's 'Bathers/Turbocapitalism’ (2023) is a work that delves into the human condition. The figures are deconstructed and reorganized in an unreal way, even though they may appear organized and rational to the eye. These figures represent different identities and are created according to various aesthetic clichés. At the heart of the work is the relationship between the depiction of a torn, syncretic, and frenetic humanity, as suggested by the term Turbocapitalism, and simultaneously statuesque and solid, reminiscent of paintings depicting bathers, evoking thoughts of Cézanne.
The central figure is composed of various faces and eyes, partially hidden by smoke. It is noticeable that two eyes always follow the viewer of the work, regardless of their position.
Carly Mandel’s 'Untitled' is a sculpture that spans three generations of women as an indirect intergenerational collaboration. Her grandmother, a prolific fiber folk artist, started the crochet component featured in 'Untitled,' which was left incomplete after passing over 20 years ago. Her mother kept the crocheted squares (informally known as granny squares) in the artist's childhood home in St. Louis, hoping to one day complete the project.
The crocheted squares are here woven into a new pattern, woven onto wood panels, and affixed to bent chrome apparatuses of unknown origin and function. Despite their unknown origin, they speak a universal language of post-industrial functionality. An aluminum cast of a hand-carved massage device (spiky foam roller) is affixed to one of the bent chrome elements in the sculpture.
Conceptually, the work speaks to the fraught history of fine art vs. craft and the latter’s status as a lesser art form due to its rival context as an expressly feminine form of labor. Considering this history as a woman artist working with modern industrial processes and traditionally masculine-making methodologies (CAD, Metals, Concrete), Mandel is exploring how this tension can be amplified by applying crochet to the functional metal object.
The convergence of these histories (fine art, craft, and engineering) can further be understood through the lens of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, which states that the differences between humans and machines are minimized in a post-industrial society, suggesting that they dissolve further as a society becomes more industrially dependent. 'Untitled,' spanning vastly different stages of industrial society through its varying components, can record this acceleration through time.
Four-channel video "I DECIDED TO MULTIPLY" is the video manifesto of Dagnini. The fragmented text is interwoven with fragments of documentation of the artist's performances and internet memes. In her performances, Dagnini pursues the obsessive idea of moving away from the familiar form of the human body. Bodies as a finished object, a social marker, and a prison of imagination. On the one hand, this quest is inherently doomed. Any attempt by the artist to acquire another form is just a game of transition, but for Dagnini, it's a serious game, and if there is even a moment when it is possible to disidentify, the "genie***” flies "out of the bottle."
* The Artsy Vanguard 2022: Felipe Baeza, by Nicole Martinez. Nov 15, 2022
** The artist would like to thank Carol Leigh for giving her permission to view and photograph her archive and Annie Sprinkle for making this possible
*** Referred to the song of Christina Aguilera, "Genie In A Bottle”, RCA, 1999
