Corporal
This exhibition showcases the originality and diversity of the gallery's artists when dealing with the subject of the human body. Channeled through different mediums - drawing, photography, sculpture and video - these works remind us of the significance of our bodies in an increasingly cerebral, digitally mediated culture.
In his photographs, Chih-Chien Wang often frames human body parts next to the sinewy textures of cut fruits and vegetables. The idea of amputation and dismemberment suggests that what is disconnected from its life source must inevitably wither and rot.
From a distance, Karilee Fuglem's Topographic Introspective photographs resemble aerials of desert landscapes: dunes, ridges and valleys formed by wind and sand. In fact, they are extreme close-ups of her skin after the birth of her second child. The body, like a landscape, is a site of memory; our scars, lumps, aches and pains are markers of our personal journeys.
In his Empreinte series, Roberto Pellegrinuzzi explores the topography of a human fingerprint showing us the three dimensions of our own fingerprints (which we are used to seeing in flat ink prints) and their inherent similarities to geographic phenomena such as deltas, islands and ridges (terms actually used in the science of fingerprinting). Since no two human fingerprints have ever been found to be identical, this is a kind of ultimate portraiture on a macro scale.
In Ed Pien's work, the human body is plunged back into the natural world and reverts to its primal self. Scenes of cannibalism (The Feet Eater), carnal desire (Come and Get It) and black magic (The Charmer Dance) show human figures unleashed from the straightjacket of societal norms acting out in animal ways. These images are disturbing precisely because they are compelling to us in their fleshy abandon.
For Maskull Lasserre, bone serves as the sculptor's primeval blueprint. In The Book of Genesis, God "sculpts" Eve from Adam's rib and the Inuit carved animal bone into magical symbols used in religious rituals. Here, Lasserre inverts the process, flawlessly shaping human bone out of wooden household items. The shamanistic titles of the works (Totem, Oracle) suggest anthropomorphism, memory and the arcane.
Adad Hannah's video stills use the human body as a marker for the passage of time. The tension in the videos results from our discomfort at watching something that is usually in motion become frozen, paralyzed. In this sense, the title of the famous painting that this tableau references (The Raft of the Medusa) takes on an added meaning. In Greek mythology, the hideous gaze of the Gorgon Medusa would turn the viewer to stone. This idea is inverted in Unwrapping Rodin, where Hannah shows us the stages of a frozen bronze figure seemingly ripping off its museum wrapping and, mummy-like, coming to life.
In Luc Courchesne and Marie Chouinard's video diptych Icônes, the artists showcase the human body in motion. The dancers' expressions of curiosity as they twist and contort their limbs in front of a panoscopic lens make us aware of the sheer wonder of the malleable vessels we inhabit. Presented as worlds in themselves by the 360 degree simultaneous viewpoint, we regard them with fascination as though gazing at rare insects trapped in a bell-jar.
In John Latour's work Fragile we are left with an artifact to decode the nature of the possible owner's physicality. Playing with our expectations of bodily scale, the artist has modified an otherwise mundane human tool (the cane) to suggest an owner of "abnormal" proportions. In the 19th and early 20th century so-called "giants" were frequently recruited into circus side-shows where they were often exploited and made to perform feats of strength that compounded many of the health issues commonly associated with their gigantism. The title Fragile reminds us that despite the object's (and hence the owner's) giant scale, the cane is a symbol of our bodily frailty.
-Simon Nakonechny (curator)
