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.

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