Amy Nathan: Slipknot Loophole – Art Plugged

Amy Nathan: Slipknot Loophole
May 14 to June 29, 2022
CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions
1401 16th St,
San Francisco
CA 94103

Slipknot Loophole, a solo exhibition of bas reliefs, drawings, paintings and blended media sculptures by Bay Spot artist Amy Nathan. The is effective in Slipknot Loophole interact the mechanisms females use to hold on their own jointly and come across that making it possible for release is an critical element of individuals devices.

Nathan’s next solo exhibition at CULT, Slipknot Loophole will be on see from Could 14 to June 29, 2022, with an opening reception on May possibly 14 from 3 to 5 p.m. at CULT’s San Francisco house (1401 16thSt.). Ranging in scale from jewelry to architecture, Nathan’s perform proceeds her substance experimentation and her acute research of the length in between image and embodiment.

Slipknot Loophole extends Nathan’s engagement with the clothingand resources that are intended to double, reshape and camouflage the physique. Eclectic in kind and playful in style, Nathan’s works are culled from sources the two historic and up to date. Fascinated in depictions of electric power as diffuse as Athena, J-Lo, Britney Spears and Medusa, Nathan reframes these icons that transcend time andorigin. Paparazzi pics and celebrity selfies are remade as Etruscan-design bas reliefs and pauseas paintings, combining figurative imagery with geometric sample and decoration.

The significant installation Pelvic Porti coincludes a kitsch phase-established-like portico, designed from a hybrid of lace underwear and the armored exo skeletons of war. Hammered metal sheets built in the picture of ruffled lingerie frame arches, and pulled threads stand in as columns.

An additional sculptural perform, Traveling Buttress, is a screen-like development of hinged and painted wooden that externalizes the corsetry lacework—hung along walls and pressed into corners in whimsical curlicues of acrylic, vinyl, paint and wood. The bows, ribbons and grommets that flex and launch a corset arethe sequential, calligraphic dots and lines that clearly show up not only in the painted wood sculptures, but also as a series of drawings.

These looping and drooping styles pause for comic effect—marginalia’s doodles writ massive. Nathan, a baby of the 1980s, remembers the corsetry of Madonna’s Blond Ambition as the second when beneath garments moved from private to community. Central to Slipknot Loophole is a trio of parts that show up to start with as bas-reliefs and recur as trompe l’oeil paintings. These three photographs of pop icons are connected by the emboldened gestures they highlight and aptly named, Ability Poses. Engaging with these visuals first through texture, Nathan produced bas-reliefs out of plaster, resin and clay, then utilised pictures and drawing to recreate their textural practical experience. Nathan speaks to how duplication and displacement of an strategy from a person materials to a different can conceal and reveal in the exact breath:

“My studio procedure of passing an graphic by means of states of being (photograph to drawing, to sculpture, to painting) furthers the distance from the original but leaves the actual physical trace of my hand. I’m fascinated in how close the casting course of action feels to photography—I make solid tablets (like printed photos) from a solitary clay slab (the “negative”). In a number of sculptures, an impression is forged onto alone a number of occasions and in distinct elements, some are opaque layers and some transparent. There is a research for the vestige’s origin that I’m intrigued in—that archaeological line we follow, hoping to come across solutions to generate the heritage, to make the fantasy.”

The official change from the performs using photographic mimesis to all those rendered in
calligraphic marks parallels the way we choose in and method photograph, image and the prepared term. Nathan calls up Susan Sontag’s maxim of “The Graphic World”: that a photograph is often “a trace, a thing stenciled right off the true.”

Slipknot Loophole also contains a large vary of drawings, friezes and sculptures immediately depictive of Western antiquity. The corset drawings and sculptures go on Nathan’s “objects as handwriting” project—using ink and calligraphy brush, Nathan draws mechanisms inside of a gridded structure evoking lined looseleaf or graph paper. In the Corset Grid drawing collection, the laces pull and launch this framework. In painted wood sculptures these types of as Flying Buttress and Shine Your Heavenly System Tonight, the figures are taken out from a grid and come across company, striking their own electricity pose.

©2022 Amy Nathan, CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions

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