Louise Bourgeois: What is the Shape of This Problem
January 23 - May 1, 2021
Although best known for her profound sculptures of monumental spiders, evocative human figures, and fleshly anthropomorphic forms, Louise Bourgeois maintained a prolific drawing and writing practice and an ongoing interest in illustrated books and printmaking throughout the course of her long career.
Louise Bourgeois: What is the Shape of This Problem presents 119 works with a focus on prints, textiles, and a series of eight holograms, ranging in date from the 1940s to the early 2000s. These works build on the raw emotional terrain of Bourgeois’ practice, and explore feelings of isolation, anger, and fear through the recurring depiction of the body, childhood, family, architecture, and the passage of time.
Chris Curreri: Thick Skull, Thin Skin
January 23 - May 1, 2021
Chris Curreri’s works complicate and dissolve seemingly dichotomous states of tenderness and violence; abjection and beauty; seduction and revulsion; self and other. They suggest an unravelling of the hermetic borders that have been constructed between us, others, and things in the world.
This exhibition brings together sculptural and photographic bodies of work that form and frame a sense of porousness and consider the tension between moments where things become fixed and the possibility of continuous, nearly imperceptible shifts—the suggestion that bodies and matter can and do exist within a continuum of potentialities.
Fin Simonetti: An Appeal to Heaven
January 23 - May 1, 2021
Fin Simonetti works with sculpture, installation, and drawing to investigate the uneasy terrain among our desire for security, states of fragility and vulnerability, and the sensorial, emotional, and psychological relationships we have to objects, bodies, and spaces. Her work adopts forms and imagery with corporal, visceral resonance that poetically undermine our senses of familiarity and ease. An Appeal to Heaven presents recent works in carved stone and stained glass that, through paradoxical relationships between form and material, connect to themes of emergency, protection, and control.
Simonetti’s use of stained glass and stone are resonant with historical and familial connections. She learned to work in stained glass – a trade practiced by generations of Italian immigrant families, including her own – from her paternal uncle who designed and fabricated windows for cathedrals and private homes. Stained glass often evokes thoughts of religious architecture, beauty, and sanctuary, but here, configured into the jagged open jaws of two bear traps, the material suggests something quite different—something threatening, dangerous, yet ultimately disastrously futile in its function.
Yvonne Kustec: The Garden
February 8 - June 6, 2021
Project Space
Within The Garden a human figure transforms into a dense landscape, overrun by flora and fauna. The body becomes the substrate from which the elements of nature grow, rooted under the skin and deep within the flesh, drawing out nutrients and impurities (those that are metaphorical, experiential, or even philosophical) that have accumulated and concentrated over the course of life. Transformations are rarely easy, and through the process that which is being transformed is compelled to embrace the challenges and difficulties of vulnerability, and to rest within uncomfortable experiences in order to emerge more powerful and renewed.
Drawing on the long history of floral work in clay, Kustec works to honour both the tradition of the craft and the delicacy and resiliency of nature through recreating its intricacies. Her sculptural works draw on nature as a metaphor for both transformation and regeneration. Elaborately rendered flowers and snakes act as symbolic representations of the virtues, attributes, and characterizations of femininity. Through these symbolic entities she seeks to work through her relationship to identity and the feminine by reflecting on her connections to tradition, representation, and patriarchal narratives and systems, in turns questioning, embracing, or redefining and rewriting them.