Featuring works from Oksana Briuhovetetska, Lori B. Crawford, Hans van der Meer, Katarzyna Mirczak, Bruno Schulz, Mitchell Squire, and Latai Taumeopeau

Opening October 3rd at 6 PM

 

Human bodies, and the relationships we have to our own bodies and the way that others present their bodies to us, are complex. Seven artists offer us their unique perspectives on the questions inherent in these relationships in "Em-bodied. Body Politics”.

 

The exhibition encompasses a range of mediums, including photography, textile collage, video, drawings, and installations. Two of the artists employ their bodies in the art, asking viewers to examine their discomfort with what they see. Mitchell Squire is a former bodybuilder who started his plein-air self portraiture in 2020, exploring the socio-sexual effects of extractive economies and race, an effort that evolved through the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of Black Lives Matter. He presents his increasing lack of fitness without apology.

 

Tongan artist Latai Taumeopeau’s “Dark Continent” performance is documented with photos taken at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney, Australia, as she spray painted herself in progressively darker shades every half hour over the course of a weekend.

 

Skin tones are also central to Lori B. Crawford’s art, which features brown paper bags that reference a decades old practice, no longer accepted, within the African American community. Called the Brown Paper Bag Test, it involved comparing one's skin tone to the color of a paper bag to determine its acceptability.

 

The textile collage “In Solidarity with Ukraine” by Oksana Briuhovetetska employs different clothing styles and skin tones to envision women united before a backdrop of sunflowers, the symbol of Ukrainian resistance to Russian occupation.

 

Paradoxically, Katarzyna Mirczak’s collection of photos, “Tools of Crime,” reminds us of bodies through their absence. Seeing images that remain after death, viewers must confront their own expectations about the mortality imposed by our existence within bodies.

 

Hans van der Meer takes a very different approach in his video of amateur football games in The Netherlands and other countries. The bodies we see in action in his work speak to the human desire for shared identification, with uniforms telling us all we need to know in this context about the affiliations of those bodies.

 

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), a significant Polish-Jewish modernist writer and artist, offers gallery visitors yet another set of experiences. Best known for his unique, dreamlike prose and drawings, his work blends autobiography, fantasy, and philosophy, depicting perhaps disturbingly honest sketches of bodies, literally or figuratively naked, and the interactions of the people who inhabit them.