About
The exhibition's title derives from a line in Ocean Vuong's poem, "Threshold" in which the poem’s subject is situated in a shifting, uncertain space within the body and outside of it. Considering the potentials of this tenuous threshold, the artworks on view vacillate between representation and presentation, public and private, orienting themselves between spaces of negation and of othering. At present, one might observe identity as ever more detached from embodiment, and in turn from history. The question emerges: what does it mean to consider materiality's agency? How might bodies and objects express resistance, malleability, and intransigence from a standpoint grounded in multiplicity? Patricia Ayres' towering anthropomorphic sculpture is at once soft and imposing. Corporeal-like stains become decorative, while historical undergarment fastenings serve as both restraint and support, merging the feminine and the industrial. Coady Brown's paintings explore intimacy and desire. Flesh defies the traditional categorization of skin tone palettes, as the figures shift between performative and personal to consider the queer muse. Jesse Darling's sculptures connect themes of productivity, resilience, and vulnerability to destabilize the assumed fitness of able body. What does it mean when the body becomes the support or the support becomes bodied? Rindon Johnson's stretched leather hides, treated with Vaseline and left to decay in outdoor elements, incorporate disembodied vestiges of a once physical source. By diverting the byproducts of cattle and oil from their intended use, Johnson confronts notions of societal value, function, and control. Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski's works on paper develop language and symbols to explore black and brown, queer femme mythology. Through these new signifiers, DeJesus Moleski's work asks whether aesthetic ideals can emerge without appropriation or a pure negation of prevailing cultural norms. In the paintings of Kaveri Raina, the body is reconsidered as a hovering motif that is both a transitory and displaced presence. Material becomes metaphor upon the burlap surface, while figurative repetition forms a pattern but presents no resolution. Precarious contingency nods to the uncertainty of becoming. Anna Sew Hoy's unbroken clay coils, wrapped in utilitarian materials, serpentine into a conjoined line that echoes both male and female anatomies. Their deceptively singular form offers a poetic and playful continuum on the body's resistance to stasis and unyielding definition.
