I thought the title of this exhibition, Show me Your Glands, at the New York Art Residency and Studios or NARS was intriguing. Turns out the curator, Tamara Johnson, was the winner of the 2012 annual NARS Emerging Curator Program Open Call.
NARS is not the name of a make-up company but an acronym for the New York Art Residency and Studios (NARS) Foundation, which occupies space in Sunset Park, not so very far from here. Located on 35th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, the Brooklyn-based foundation provides low-cost studio space and short-term residencies that connect with the needs of both emerging and mid-career artists. It hopes to create a sense of community and collaboration between the artists, as well.
Show Me Your Glands is a group exhibition with a body-centric approach.
The place where entities meet, bodies compress, muscles rip, and where soft insides are revealed on exteriors; where the ability to identify the self is dissolved and words and images transform into objects, architecture and orifices. These points of contact serve as anchors, stabilizing the moment when guts are drawn out and anthropomorphized as subtle gestures and confrontational situations. The works featured in this unique grouping of artists expands the landscape of body, uncovering the existence of a corporeal gland residing below the surface of making.
Through sculpture, performative language, image and video this exhibition makes physical inner ephemera. Alina Szapocznikow, a Polish Artist, speaks to the importance of the “material body” demonstrating the necessity for work to mine the absurd and convulsive existence of a bodily unknown.
In this exhibition, Mimi Cabell and Catherine Siller use video to de-emphasize the function of word and phrase, focusing on language’s ability to take physical shape through active repetition. Lindsay Carone produces quilted patterns from recycled plastics, creating deflated and hollow feminine forms reminiscent of organs, aprons and skin. Kate Wignall creates structures that are intimate in proximity, yet overwhelming in scale and placement. Rachel Klinghoffer dips, ties, and knots her “paintings” suggesting the skeletal make-up of the body inside and out. Karen Lederer, Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas, Amber Heaton and Amanda Thackray use the printed image to evoke the insides of self, literally through drawing studies of muscle tissues to the overlaying of shapes and color, rigid and limp, grid-like and organic. Hayley Austin captures the dichotomy of male and female spaces through a practice that conveys identity in portraits and architecture. Collaborative duo Claudia Bitran and Quintin Rivera-Toro uncover a physical sense of connectivity with a performance allowing viewers to witness a confrontational and intimate moment of intimacy and physical force between two bodies.
The combinations of these works gnaw at a sensory affect, subtle and abrupt, visceral and factual, somatic and emotional. Exposing the desire to encounter something secret, something vulnerable and something intrinsically relatable –these haptic representations remind us of our own bodies and our relationship to them.
– Tamara Johnson