by Anne Gabriel
Art has always had a sexual undercurrent, overcurrent and straight up explicit current but lately, and when I say lately I mean the last 2 years, I’ve seen sculptural and mixed media exhibitions centered on skin and muscle.
Skin and muscle in this sense means sculptural and mixed material amalgamations that look like, feel like, or act like human tissue.
At least two recent shows by female artists in the Los Angeles area, including Trulee Hall at Francios Ghebaly and a duo show of Kristin Reger and Maggie Petroni at Sade, showcased and highlighted tissue.
Hall’s show included twisted, gnarled, tongue-like specimens animatedly protruding from holes cut into gallery walls, while the Reger/Petroni show included thick, weighty, juicy, meaty tongues made of ceramic and mixed media. Both shows conjuring the opposite of glory holes with pointy promises of vigorous insertion.
In companion to these muscled masses particularly in the Reger/Petroni show, was remnants of ongoing conversations of precariously and tightly stretched orifices created of skin-like materials most often of snappy and sinewy natural latex or glistening resined gauze. Often stretched taught with filament and sometimes with BDSM-esque hardware, clips and hooks.
Seen separately, each show titillating on its own, but together a pattern of female mixed media sculptors perhaps shifting the female gaze towards the verb of copulation rather than merely producing stationary objects for the sake of cerebral and conceptual object observation.
Thank god.
Photo: SADE Los Angeles