Ambiguous Bodies

Release date: November 03, 2009 |

Ambiguous Bodies, an art exhibition exploring different interpretations of the human body, will be presented at Goucher College’s Silber Gallery in the Athenaeum from Tuesday, November 3, through Sunday, December 13.

This exhibit, which is free and open to the public, can be viewed Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. An artist's reception will be held Thursday, November 19, at 6 p.m. in the Silber Gallery. Call 410-337-6477 for more information.

The human body can be interpreted in diverse ways. In the exhibition Ambiguous Bodies, 10 artists employ the idea of ambiguity, dismantling notions of the classical and the ideal form, while simultaneously broadening the scope of the human form to include differences of beauty, race, sexuality, and gender.

Heather Boaz uses video to explore the limitations of her body. She uses close cropping of specific body parts to press the boundary between truth and fiction in relation to video documentation. Her body becomes dislocated, disjointed. Mouths become eyes; hands become feet; the body is torn apart and put back together, and body parts are reassigned to suggest a strange humor. The activities performed are both awkward and absurd and explore the relationship between artistic talent and the body.

Jeanne-Marie Burdette’s sculptures revolve around her fascination with fractals in nature. She examines the way plants grow and the patterns they form. In this work, plants become a metaphor for the growth cycles constantly occurring within the body. In her two sculptural clothing pieces, Torchlily Dress and Broccoli Hat, she imagines the human body being consumed by the plants— two living organisms growing and changing in unison.

In her work, Elizabeth Crisman mutates the human form as a way to investigate and represent the body’s evolution. She photographed male and female bodies in various static and kinetic positions and then tore and restructured the images, suturing the parts with black cotton thread. These grotesque assemblages are bodies “in between.” They retain something of their original state but are not wholly natural. Crisman’s work is a metaphor for our attempts to fight nature and take control of our bodies. With each attempt to attain the idealized body, the more mutated and artificial we become.

Joshua Crown’s drawings are the product of a “concise creativity”— he conveys his momentary feelings and steps back to see what has emerged. Working from photographs of the human form, Crown’s drawings have an incomplete structure; they lack details that might distinguish them.

Ellen Durkan creates forged steel cages that encase nude female forms. The self-supporting sculptures are armor, but they can stand alone as a shells, housings, or casings without a form inside. They are carefully constructed to emphasize balance and symmetrical form. The surrounded body is soft and vulnerable and contrasts with the bulk of the steel structure. The soft inner body is not protected by her armor, but left powerless and immobilized by it. Durkan’s work also features platform-heel shoes that range in height from 12 to 24 inches. The shoes are made of wood, cast iron, and steel, making it impossible for the wearer—presumably a woman—to move in them. They are only meant for standing. While the ensemble restricts the body’s movement, it is also meant to act as a physical barrier to viewers. In this way, the woman is immobile, but still in control.

The large-scale photographs in Jason Horowitz’s Corpus series not only exhibit the fascinating visual terrain of the human body, but also reveal our unspoken biases about beauty, ugliness, body image, race, sexuality, aging, and the thresholds of exhibitionism. Though shot with the glamour lighting used for fashion images, these photographs subvert that process to show what is real, rather than what is ideal. Horowitz does this to play with the tension between attraction and repulsion. By providing an extraordinary amount of detail about the subject from a medical viewpoint, as well as a personal and sometimes-sensuous one, Horowitz allows us to look deeply at ourselves and others.

Through her drawings and performance works, Jackie Milad explores the complex interactions between strangers. In this series, she focuses on piropos, clever Spanish pick-up lines, often reserved for the street, that carry multiple meanings. Piropos are sometimes innocent, but in the case of most, they are meant to shock the recipient with vulgarity. The portraits in Milad’s Piropos series represent both the recipient and the giver—the seducer and the seduced, the predator and the prey—of these classic come-on lines.
 
Jenny Mullins’ installation series explores power relationships, grotesque figuration, and the complex dynamic of voyeurism. She combines translucent fluorescent vellum, ink, and sequins, among other materials, to create layered drawing installations that are both whimsical and sinister. Conjuring Dr. Seuss, Trixie Little, and Laylah Ali’s typology drawings, Mullins’ most recent work is a series of faceless burlesque figures dressed in hot pink and bondage, some of whom are brandishing knives, others who are being swallowed or expelled by ambiguously suited chimeras perched on kitchen chairs. She uses truncated human figures encased in giant suits of yellow hair and leather belts to explore the blurriness between the roles of victim and villain.

Lynn Palewicz’s drawings illustrate the relationship between touch, tension, and surface. Each piece uses the body to distort a variety of images and marks drawn onto skin. Pinches, creases, and scratches marked onto the body’s surface function as drawing elements alongside penned images and marks. Photography more than documents the performance of these drawings, it disorients the viewer's relationship with the body and represents the skin as a drawing surface.

April Wood’s work expresses the vulnerability of the human body and the inherent violence of consumption and digestion. Her materials are meant to be both attractive and repellant—she aims to highlight visceral beauty, the connection between interior and exterior, and the intersection of nourishment and arousal. In an age of fast food, TV dinners, and disposable silverware, Wood creates artwork that has a sense of history, a sensuality, and a relationship with the physical nature of the human experience.