This Is My Bodys
Bodega, New York
September 8 — October 30, 2021
Group exhibition with Covey Gong, Sam Lipp, B. Ingrid Olson, Paul Thek
→ https://www.derosia.nyc/exhibitions/this-is-my-bodys
This Is My Bodys is an exhibition featuring work by Covey Gong, Sam Lipp, B. Ingrid Olson, and Paul Thek. The title for the exhibition comes from text within an etching made by Paul Thek in 1975, whose companions from the same series are included in this exhibition. Only a portion of these etchings were proofed in the artist’s lifetime, many were unprinted, and the series was not known in its entirety until 1989, a year after Thek’s death, when 28 etched copper plates were discovered in the artist’s personal storage unit amongst a multitude of other works. The entire series of etchings involves a poetic play on punctuation and mirroring, the first plates etched by Thek without realizing the fact that the etched copper plates would print their contents in reverse. Thus THE CROSS OF POLLYANNA and SWEET CORN read from right to left while subsequent plates, like AVE EVA, incorporate the mirroring into the work itself.
The body and mirroring appear as motifs elsewhere in this exhibition, perhaps most clearly in the work of B. Ingrid Olson. Her work Cuirass refers to the breastplate/backplate of a suit of armor and is composed of one image framed within another. The exterior image pictures an assemblage of folded cardboard and brown packing tape topped by a ceramic, ovular, breast-like prop. The inner image is the reflective interior of a soft tube pressed against a breast, forming a channel between camera lens and nipple. The mirror-like interior of the conical shape both abstracts and camouflages the breast, repeating and radially extending the darker tone of the areola in the rippled reflection. As a result, the interior image feels like an x-ray through an armor made of detritus.
The body in relation to boundaries and space leads directly to Sam Lipp’s three painted works in the exhibition. The two works on view in the main gallery depict bodies whose heads are cropped by the boundaries of their surfaces. Both works share the same title: Headless (Acéphale), a reference to Georges Bataille’s public review whose 1936 first issue’s cover depicted a headless version of Leonardo’s embodiment of classical reason, Vitruvian Man. The first of Lipp’s headless figures is painted on a medical waste disposal box and, although the entire surface is covered in Lipp’s unique brand of painterly interference, the words “BioReference” and “GenPath’’ remain clear and legible. Each of Lipp’s other works are painted on prismatic film mounted to steel, a surface which recalls the hard and smooth reflectivity of a street sign, however in this context creates a visual interference in the figurative paintings that, when viewed at an angle, adds prismatic rainbows to otherwise monochromatic images.
On the far wall in the rear of the main gallery, a violet crushed velvet fabric hangs from ceiling to floor. Inset in the center of the fabric is an ink drawing hovering somewhere between abstraction and figuration. Covey Gong’s three untitled works resist categorization; the metal and knit polyester floor sculpture exists somewhere between creature and architecture, its four thin legs enabling an oscillation between porcupine and scale model geodesic dome. The qualities in Gong’s work remind us of the experiential pleasures of looking and of being a body in space, sentiments expressed by Susan Sontag in her influential essay Against Interpretation. According to Sontag’s biographer, the title for the essay was inspired by a conversation with her close friend, Paul Thek. One day, when Sontag was “talking about art in a cerebral way that many complained was a bore,” Thek interrupted: “Susan, stop, stop. I’m against interpretation. We don’t look at art when we interpret it. That’s not the way to look at art.”