ART CITIES:N.York-Eyes of the Skin

Engaging various degrees of abstraction, the works in the group exhibition “Eyes of the Skin” are united by each artist’s focus on materiality, process, and tactility. The title references Juhani Pallasmaa’s 1996 book by the same name, in which Pallasmaa argues that contemporary aesthetics has placed too strong a priority on vision to the detriment of our other senses.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive

Pushing back against the dominance of the eye and the biased hierarchies of visual art history, the exhibition “Eyes of the Skin” focuses on “the role of the body as the locus of percept ion,” and emphasizes the importance of indigenous, intuitive, and somatic knowledge as a primary source for understanding our world. Acknowledging that touching is a way of knowing, “Eyes of the Skin” privileges the mysterious but indelible knowledge we acquire from our personal experience with matter and the intelligence inherent to materials themselves. The over 20 works included in this exhibition highlight tactility and physicality, and bear witness to the intimate, psychic, and emotional relationship developed between each artist and their chosen materials. By tracing their intricate actions, we are able to feel our way through these works, unlocking a deeper understanding of how each was made by accessing our own bodily memory of tactile experiences. For each artist, however, this sensorial knowledge takes a deeper, more complex form, unraveling personal mythologies and layering nuanced socio- political content within the rituals of their creative practices. Artists have a unique understanding of their work gleaned from the introspective, iterative reciprocity they have with their materials, and in turn, the materials themselves carry their own potent cultural histories, life force, and ideas. In these works, art making is revealed to be a subtle, poetic dialogue between artist and material that resists explanation, and evidence of the artist’s moving hand and body can be seen throughout the exhibition, subtly revealing the dynamic and interactive process of making and the physicality, timing, and trajectory it so often involves. An Afro-Caribbean-Latinx-queer-woman raised-by-their-grandmother and hailing from The Bronx, Francheska Alcántara explores slippages in-between memories, fragmentations and longing. Their aim is to explore the specific social meaning within the realm of domestic and public life of artifacts and interactions such as: hand-washing their underwear with cuaba soap while taking a shower, setting up buckets to catch rainwater to wash their hair, and peeling plátanos with the knife that has the right sharpness to follow the platano’s curve without cutting their hand. Francheska wants to use these subjective experiences to expand our capacity for pleasure, love and intra-connection.

Carolina Caycedo makes work that addresses the commons, environmental justice, just energy transition and cultural and environmental biodiversity. Through her studio practice and fieldwork with communities impacted by large-scale infrastructure and other extraction projects, she invites viewers to consider the unsustainable pace of growth under capitalism and how we might embrace resistance and solidarity. Process and participation are central to Caycedo’s practice, bringing a collective dimension through performances, photographs and videos. Her work contributes to the construction of environmental memory as a fundamental space for climate and social justice. It challenges us to understand nature not as a resource to be exploited, but as a living and spiritual entity that unites people beyond borders. Adriana Corral’s interdisciplinary, research-based practice boldly explores memory, loss, human rights abuses and unwritten histories. Often working across international borders, she mines state and national archives for primary documents and engages historians, anthropologists, journalists, gender scholars, human rights attorneys and victims’ families for information that materializes in her performances, sculptures and installations. These refined, contemplative works, in turn, encourage us to question and unpack the power (or lack thereof) of our own voices as well as the voices of forgotten, displaced or exploited communities and individuals. David Antonio Cruz explores the intersectionality of queerness and race through painting, sculpture, and performance. Focusing on queer, trans, and gender fluid communities of color, Cruz examines the violence perpetrated against their members, conveying his subjects both as specific individuals and as monumental signifies for large and urgent systemic concerns. His most recent series explores the notion of ‘chosen family’: the nonbiological bonds between queer people, based in mutual support and love. Each painting depicts the likeness of the artist’s own community, and at the same time the portraits strive to capture much more than the physical representation of the figures; they venerate the overall structure of queer relationships, captured through intimate moments of touch, strength, support, and celebration. Kira Dominguez Hultgren is a U.S.-based textile artist. She studied French postcolonial theory and literature at Princeton University, and performance and fine arts in Río Negro, Argentina. In 2019, Dominguez Hultgren earned a dual-degree MFA/MA in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts. Her research interests include material and embodied rhetorics, loom technologies, decolonizing material culture, and analyzing textiles as a performative critique against the visual.

Leslie Martinez was born in the Rio Grande Valley of the South Texas-Mexico border and raised in Dallas, Texas. In the decade between they worked as a graphic designer in New York’s fashion industry which profoundly influenced new ideas around image and object construction. Martinez creates abstract paintings following a life-long interest in boundary permeation and the dualities and negations present between queerness and borders – in particular how these ideas manifest and evolve materially and gesturally. Themes of self-determination, embodiment, obfuscation, and futurity, are channeled through visual and haptic references to destruction and reconfiguration. Fabric and paper-based materials processed over the course of months and years are forged into dense and dissolving surfaces of sensorial sprawling color using non-traditional tools and techniques.  Born in Puerto Rico and raised in the Bronx, Glendalys Medina is interested in patterns, how they are formed and give meaning. Humans are amazing pattern-recognition machines with the ability to detect their disruptions or “recursive probabilistic fractals” according to inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil. She investigates existing patterns in order to understand how to form new patterns of behavior, thought, structure and meaning. Patterns dictate our understanding of life and who we are, and to change these meanings, we must disrupt them and make new concrete goal-oriented patterns in order to create social change. The style of her work is heavily influenced by systematic structures, the cadence of Hip-Hop rappers, the affirmations and visualization exercises of New Thought ministers and authors, the signatures of graffiti writers, the moves of break-dancers, and traditional Taíno motifs. Jeffrey Meris works across sculpture, installation, performance, and drawing to consider ecology, embodiment and various lived experiences while healing deeply personal and historical wounds. Born in Haiti and raised in the Bahamas, Meris’s work considers the impacts of naturalization, (dis)placement, and racial interpellation while aiming for transcendence. Exploring the physical and metaphorical potential of materials and processes, Meris engages complex narratives and questions of identity, race, class, gender, and sexuality. Meris has described his work as “environmental,” informed equally by the circumstances and conditions surrounding its making. The conversations one has as a viewer with the installations, sculptures, and multi-media compositions are filled with depth. Through a collection of varied angles of craft, the artist proposes themes of spirituality, selfhood, and a whole lot of leather. Esteban Ramón Pérez derives inspiration from an upbringing of threads and needles, to generate a body of work that is masterful and deliberate through that very practice. The viewer swims in feathers, religious iconography, gold, and leather, feeling fabulous, yet buried deep in thought.

Participating artists: Francheska Alcántara, Carolina Caycedo, Adriana Corral, David Antonio Cruz, Kira Dominguez Hultgren, Leslie Martinez, Glendalys Medina, Jeffrey Meris and Esteban Ramón Pérez.

Photo: Glendalys Medina, The Sun (El Sol) [detail], 2020, Paint, ink, oil pastel, thread and nails on wood, 42 x 56 inches, 106.7 x 142.2 cm, © Glendalys Medina, Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery

Info: Curator: Teresita Fernández, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 501 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 8/6-12/8/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com/