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1. Orgasm, 2024, cement, Aliexpress sandalwood hand fan, hardware. 11 1/2 x 8 x 6 inches.
2. The Lantern was Smoking a Black Thread, 2024, insulation foam, plaster, doll's eyes, synthetic wax, pantyhose, Hei Mu Er Chinese mushroom, textile scrap, artist's hair, oyster shell, press-on nails, paper pulp.
5. Vive L'amour, 2024, cement, Aliexpress sandalwood hand fan, hardware. 11 1/2 x 8 x 6 inches.
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"Fantasies and Foreclosure" takes its name from a panel discussion with the scholar Lauren Berlant and their theory of cruel optimism. Cruel optimism underscores affective relationships that bind individuals to promises of contemporary capitalism that in actuality inhibit their own flourishing: take the fiction of the American dream and the realities of adjustment, translation, and loss that underpin its process.
Engaging directly with legacies of figurative sculpture, from Modernism’s chief innovations of abstraction and non-monumentality, to the figurative work of such female sculptors as Kiki Smith and Louise Bourgeois of the 60s and 70s, this exhibition is one response to the question of the contemporary figure, multifarious flesh flitting between labouring, migrating, and consumer body. Central to Fantasies and Foreclosure is a Taoist world view which problematizes the Cartesian mind-body divide, a Western construction that divorces a subject from its sensory potentials and is instrumental to the subjugation of vast populations.
By working with materials such as pantyhose, acrylic nail extensions, Chinatown tourist fans, and a chunk of the artist's hair, this exhibition employs an intentional visual vernacular of materials with relationships to failure, decay, transcience, and ubiquity - the detritus of daily metabolisms that capital renders as waste.
Through registers abject, poetic, and contingent, Fantasies and Foreclosure prods the deeply integrated relationship of desire and capital. It asks, when the body is the locus of its enactment and mediates its labour, how does a subject reconcile with their impulses? What is the potential of material imagination to complicate and abjure these relationships?
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Butterflies
Take Advantage, 2024
Cement, sandalwood hand fan, hardware
1000 Stars and Suns, 2024
Cement, sandalwood hand fan
Tokyo Sonata, 2024
Cement, sandalwood hand fan, broken glass, hardware
Lambasted in the Woods, 2024
Cement, sandalwood hand fan, hair net, hardware
Slipper, 2024
Cement, sandalwood hand fan, hardware
Orgasm, 2024
Cement, sandalwood hand fan, hardware
Thread the Needle, 2024
Cement, sandalwood hand fan, wax, textile, bells, hardware
Lay Idle, Finger of Longing, 2024
Cement, sandalwood hand fan, stickers, hardware
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