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In ‘Limbless’ Fragments Contract and Intervene

In ‘Limbless’ Fragments Contract and Intervene

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M. David & Co.
Installation view of “Limbless.” Courtesy of M. David & Co.

In Limbless artists working in divergent mediums and materials converge in their shared concern with mortality, the limit or fragility of the body, and ways in which the body is demanded to perform according to the parameters of cultural imaginaries. The exhibition at M. David & Co. is full of thrilling discoveries. The high-ceiling formerly industrial space of Art Cake in Sunset Park, which hosts the gallery, gives the works on view ample room to breathe—some works therefore are hung below eye level. For this very reason, viewers are implicated in, if not outright identifying with, these intimate distortions of bodily forms.

Direct interventions into the bodily form can be seen in Lesley Bodzy’s Untitled (2024). The sculpture is foremost a delicate exercise in the transformation of materiality—the lightness of nylon spandex is nowhere to be found; instead, the material, traditionally associated with ideas of femininity due to its use in underwear or legging production, hardened by polyurethane foam, forms a pair of phallic objects. Acrylic paint suggestive of blood or fresh wound covers parts of the surface of the phallus shape. Simultaneously, the sculpture’s elongated physicality, plastic and synthetic color, and somewhat impoverished interiority exude a sense of abjectness, untethered from familiar conceptions of a closed, united body. The phallic shape also lends itself to associations with severed limbs or fleshly overgrowth.

M. David & Co. Lesley Bodzy
Lesley Bodzy. “Untitled,” 2024. Courtesy of M. David & Co.

Bodzy’s sculptural investigation of affective excess feels particularly timely today, given the return or revival of body horror (particularly dramatics of body modification) as a genre in popular culture. The body is returning as a battlefield in politics and visual culture, affording Bodzy’s sculptural practice, animated by how beauty is both an impossible pursuit that has no ending and an attractive enterprise that promises brighter futures, extra urgency. Just as the culture of beauty creates ideas of the body removed from physical reality yet harboring real psychic power, Untitled carries a body without its full referent, simultaneously obscured and revealed by the ambivalent flux that defines the conundrum of embodiment.

M. David & Co. Ginnie Peterson Sam Shaffer
Ginnie Peterson. “Harbinger,” 2024 and Sam Shaffer. “Untitled,” 2024. Courtesy of M. David & Co.

A seductively gleaming installation Harbinger (2024) by sculptor Ginnie Peterson opens the exhibition. Peterson’s multivalent form, made out of industrial materials such as plaster, resin, and wire, is inspired by the artist’s background in farming and floral design and therefore takes on an organic flow despite its materiality. Neon lights interjected into recesses and gaps among interconnected parts of differing density inject into the work a sense of weightlessness that suggests influences from Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin, or Judy Pfaff, one of her mentors. However, Harbinger, registered in a spectrum of shades ranging from iridescent pink to muted red, visually evokes deforming or mutating body tissue rather than the nature of abstraction. Its spiky and centerless organization reminds us that decay and rebirth can co-exist with a singular body.

All artists in Limbless were selected by Michael David, who serves as the show’s curator, from his Yellow Chair Salon’s Symposia! program. Yellow Chair is a post-level graduate program where emerging artists convene in a series of Salons led by artist-mentors including Pfaff, Kyle Staver, Jen Samet, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, and Astrid Dick with advisory hours with David, a painter in his own right. Fostering intergenerational conversations, the program accepts artists of all ages, and helps, in his words, “form a community to deepen their practice and learn from one another.” At M. David & Co., select Symposia! participants, mentors, and outside artists are exhibited in group and solo shows.

Sam Shaffer
Sam Shaffer. “Dead Pike,” 2023 and “Inside,” 2023. Courtesy of M. David & Co.

Sam Shaffer’s untitled work on paper, which is a face enlarged and painted over and over to the point of being unrecognizable, is installed next to Harbinger. Shaffer, a painter who left New York in the 1980s and works from rural Pennsylvania, is interested in painting as a palimpsest of drives and desires that act upon the body. The artist’s interest in the limit of representation, manifested through intentionally crude color palette and dreamlike composition rift with chance and accident, shares affinity with ‘bad painting’ such as those of Jutta Koether and Mira Schor and European masters of psychological realism. Along with the two other paintings installed in the back room, Dead Pike (2023) and Inside (2023), a fantastically flowing eye and the lower part of a body respectively, Shaffer’s Untitled (2024) edges on anonymity due to his investment in the materiality of the surface and disinterest in representing coherent bodies. These works nevertheless convey certain emotional truths about how bodies enter collective imaginations which are inaccessible in naturalism. While Shaffer’s fragmented bodies are patches of mark-making with rough-edged contours, they remind us that traces of a body are just as paramount as a physical body in narratives of self.

Francesca Schwartz
Above: Francesca Schwartz. “After the Ball,” 2024. Installation. Courtesy of M. David & Co. Below: Robin Dintiman. “Masked,” 2020, “Suffocating,” 2020, “Ghost,” 2020, “Reflect,” 2020, and “Helpless,” 2020. Courtesy of M. David & Co.

Elsewhere, Francesca Schwartz, who is a Freudian psychoanalyst by training, presents After the Ball (2024), an installation imagining the dramatic scene after the event of trauma. A lavish burlap dress emptied of its wearer and crushed by the gravity of existence, After the Ball is haunted by the palpable absence of the human body. Robin Dintiman’s series of feminist photography, on the other hand, zooms into fabric as stand-ins for flesh—except for the more literal Suffocating (2020). An atmosphere of contrived contraction can be felt here, as the clever contrast of light and shadow ensures each body or its proxy appears fragmented or incomplete. Taken together, the series can also be viewed as a self-reflexive meditation on photography as an apparatus of representation that always already fragments the body for visual pleasure. Dintiman’s works only reveal the process and perceptual conditions of possibility that make such fragmentation possible.

Limbless featured work by Lesley Bodzy, Robin Dintiman, Ginnie Peterson, Francesca Schwartz, and Sam Shaffer and was open at M. David & Co. from December 6 to December 28, 2024.

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