Noticed >> Works of Bodies

by Heather White
In the few weeks since ArtSync TV premiered, we’ve featured short interviews with Shary Boyle from the opening of Flesh and Blood at the AGO (see clip here) and with Martin Golland from the opening for his show at Birch Libralato, Skins and Skeletons (see clip here). Which got me thinking: are these titles just paying lip service, or is there something really afoot with the body in this city? Below, brief reviews of these and two other similarly pitched shows.

Shary Boyle: Flesh and Blood @ the AGO. The title is no misnomer: in the four-roomed multimedia fantasmagoria of Flesh and Blood, the body is never absent. What it is, often, is contorted, naked, female, and ambiguous in its borders. In Virus (White Wedding), a life-sized plaster nude holds out a butterfly net that’s textured like a spiderweb and shaped like an archer’s bow; it feeds directly into (or out of) her mouth and gut, both a part of her and not. Various other viscera abound in unexpected guises: strings of beads evoke a craftish, surreal vomit [see below]; in a painted portrait of the artist, a pearly grid envelops the face in a net that may as well be amniotic fluid. After all, logical alignment with the real world isn’t the point; mood is, and it’s very physical. Indeed, though sometimes otherworldly or incongruent, Boyle’s subjects have an urgent reality to them that isn’t dampened – is, rather, intensified – by elongating their arms or gnarling their ears. Neither does the prevalence of porcelain negate the quality of flesh, and, though references to actual blood may be scarce, the notion of the gory, incredible, absurd substance within us pervades.

Martin Golland: Skins and Skeletons @ Birch Libralato. In this show, by contrast, it’s an effort to find much skin or skeleton; these oil paintings are preoccupied with treatments of angles and detritus in space. The title, then, seems to refer not as much to the human figure as to outsides (skins) and insides (skeletons) in general; devoid of figures, the compositions transition between open air and interiors, abstraction and representation. But not, to my mind, altogether convincingly: though the intention is welcome, Golland’s challenge to conventional boundaries sometimes reads as indecision. The paint builds up messily in places, but lacks the feeling that would make it read gesturally. A touch more commitment would go a long way in these intriguingly dense and deserted – but sometimes all too inhuman – works.

Katie Pretti, Sarah Clifford-Rashotte, Amanda Nedham: Bloodletting @ Le Gallery. Here, the exhibition text explains, bloodletting is invoked as a metaphor for the creative release that informs and unites the work of Pretti, Clifford-Rashotte, and Nedham. An intense and even lofty claim, perhaps, but all three artists do engage the body in different and innovative ways. Pretti’s paintings are muscular coils of deep reds, peaches, and greys that conjure figures and their parts. Sometimes languid and sometimes tense, the rhythm of the works prevents their all-overness from becoming tedious. Clifford-Rashotte’s work is most successful where she explicitly considers the contortions of flesh: her ‘Face Punch’ collages conceive imploding features as fanned, folded magazine images – but I’d still like these better as studies for something more fully conceived. Nedham modulates the theme into the realm of textiles, which show up both as material in her installations and as a prominent feature, meticulously depicted, in a companion graphite drawing [see above]. The standout of the three, Nedham’s art — like Boyle’s — trades grisly viscosity for psychological resonance in depicting the pained awkwardness of insides.

David Harper: Skin and Bone @Textile Museum. In Harper’s work, the body is both a theoretical touchstone and a material substrate. In his striking sculptural contributions, cow hide is fashioned into the bodies of various other animals (a horse; a fleet of downed, half-bodied deer) and support embroidery of human imagery (a figure; faces). And between the strong, elegant lines, there’s even more at stake than the interaction between human and animal or skin and bone: there’s the mingling of audacity with care, of the clumsy inevitabilities of life with the intricate decisions of art.