Installation views, Olympia, 2021
Photography: Gregory Gentert
Slippage
Solo Exhibition
Olympia, New York, NY
June 29th - July 3rd, 2021
Curated by Sophia park
Press Release
Cynthia,
I remember meeting you at Prospect Park last summer. I was grateful you started the conversation and that we haven’t stopped talking since. Our meeting is a memory I keep close to my heart. It is one of the few I had in the first few months of the pandemic.
Memory is a tool that you use to unfurl instinctive reflexes and gut feelings many experience. You’re not attempting to recreate memories per say, but are using them as guiding principles. We all have preconceived notions of shapes and what they evoke. I recall looking at Diplomatic Language and seeing the two pearls stuck between something that looked faintly like a tongue, maybe even the back of a throat. My reaction was visceral - my throat tightened as I flashed back to being four years old. I’d just moved to the United Kingdom and didn’t speak English. I desperately had to pee and couldn’t say it. There is much frustration in not being able to communicate with people, which happens often even in the same language. I wonder what personal histories of yours live within these sculptures and how our experiences might be connected.
Your work investigates how singular parts of our bodies propel our thoughts and feelings. They remind me that my own body is made up of bones, fluids, muscles, water, and blood; all of the messiness which makes us up. Looking conjures specific shapes of me, from the omnipresent like my teeth to those that I only know abstractly, like my pelvis. There is something timeless about these forms, although both mine and yours will inevitably turn to dust.
Ann Hamilton once asked, “What is the relationship between how our bodies know things and how we embody our knowledge through actions and touch?” Hamilton’s framework is crucial to my own navigation of your practice. Anatomy, as your visual departure, provides us with an opportunity to connect with each other and come to understand that our bodies are all composed of the same messiness.
-Sophia