Sarah Slappey and Ryan Wilde. Soft, Pink and Warm

About

Wilde’s soft sculpture and Slappey’s painting coalesce in this hyper-sexual world. Through the use of dismembered parts of the body – lips, breasts and hands – they explore this realm of extreme femininity and address the ownership of female bodies. In reaction to the domestic exhibition space, all the works are in shades of pink and flesh tones reflecting the intimacy of the space and the socially prescribed role of females in the home.

Slappey’s paintings reduce the human form to parts and limbs to not only serve as an extension of the viewer’s body, but to address the vulnerability of the human body; a tug or grab could either be for pleasure or pain, or both. Through her work, she addresses the paradoxes within the natural and human world; softness is counterbalanced with aggression, comfort with vulnerability, banal with the uncanny, and masculine with femininity. This constant shift keeps the paintings bordering on the razor-thin edge between sweet and sinister.

Constructed in felt and other tactile materials with provocative color, and design, Wilde’s work manifests the uncanny extreme that is identified with sexuality, fetish, gender and the seductive female. By highlighting the semiotic mechanism of the cultural expression, her work creates a platform to reconsider the purpose of the conventional system of signification.

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