By Appointment: February 24-April 6, 2024
Opening Reception: February 24, 2-5pm
The sculptures, videos, and pictures in this exhibition draw on Korean shamanistic practices, 19th C. European anatomical devices and pseudoscience, horror movie special effects, and photographic optics. What they put in play is an image of the body as a plastic material that serves as a metaphor for a transmutable identity. The show points to different approaches to representing and reproducing the body as a way to understand/confound the meaning of it.
In a studio visit with Gutierrez leading up to this show he said to me that he wants to articulate something about queerness: a feeling that it involves a malleability of the self. That malleability is both a product of the slipperiness of gender, but also the ways that one can absorb and reject different histories at different times, allow one’s body to forefront different characteristics, and to make oneself permeable to the world and its various organisms and materials.
In the sculpture Feet, polychromed hydrocal that looks uncannily like flesh, shows the deep impressions of blades that have been pressed against the skin just short of breaking. The style of rendering flesh recalls pathology museums from the dawn of clinical medicine in Europe, but the green of the sculpture’s base is pigmented with mugwort used in coloring Korean rice cakes. While the look of the thing suggests the clinical, the action represented derives from Korean shamanistic ritual. The gesture of pressing into the feet highlights the threshold of the body’s surface. The sculptural qualities of weight, tension, surface and fold run into the problems of identification for the viewer—It looks like it hurts to be that object. And yet we can deduce that it’s a pain designed to test the limits of what the body can be and transform it.
In the video work Color Test (Double Negative) Gutierrez deploys a technique reminiscent of pre-digital special effects. A baffling image of a face where positive is negative, and original is copy, is produced by meticulously painting lifecasts which appear on screen and playing them against their fleshy counterparts.
Gutierrez describes this idea, which is at the heart of the show:
During mitosis, a cell splits into two identical copies. The moment the identical copies are formed, the parent cell ceases to exist. This work is a feeling out of that moment.