Lesley Bodzy Working the Surface and Depth of Memory
Lesley Bodzy’s solo show Levity and Depth at M. David & Co. is delightfully sincere in its shared affinity with the language of therapeutic confessions and earnestly cognizant of the constraints and conditions of what confessions can do. The exhibition approaches Bodzy’s many latex-based sculptures not as disparaging objects but as elements belonging to an interconnected system. Therefore, Bodzy’s works appear to be a singular installation spanning multiple levels of heights. The scenography evokes the spatial arrangements of a cathedral or an amusement park—play and devotion indeed share more commonalties than one is likely to think—but Bodzy’s erotically and affectively charged investigations into the materiality of latex and resin are not portals into the divine or objects of enjoyment. They plunge into the recesses of the unconscious and its many traces and allude to how a body crumbles apart under the psychical burden of memory. Bodzy makes abject the limit of subjectivity, delineating the ethical task of reaching such limit, despite the pain of doing so.
An essential part of Bodzy’s practice is to start from the place of thought and arrive at a sensual vision of said thought. For example, Unavoidable caraphernelia, 2024, is a latex balloon deformed by the injection of overflowing resin and chained to the ceiling. As the title suggests, the work speaks to melancholic compulsions for remembering the desired yet lost, a kind of compulsion that subjugates the mind to the pain of reanimating loss. Formally, Unavoidable caraphernelia does reveal much about obsession and desperation. Upper part of the elongated latex structure is stretched thin, with its skin-like surface all the more translucent, and retaining the seductive smoothness of its original materiality. The lower part appears to be dried out, densely populated wrinkled strips or curls that inwardly group, somewhat abject, as if was an overgrowth of the upper part. Together, they reference how episodic memories of an object’s former life, and by extension archives of a former partner’s life, are not localizable, occupying an economy that is always emergent, forever in flux, somewhat situated between legible bodily conduct and unintelligibility.
Torments of the psyche are evoked in a few other works as well. On the floor, Ineffable afterimage, 2024 seems to position remembrance as a two-part apparatus, an environment of situatedness and the situated object itself. The work is a latex balloon sitting on a swath of polyurethane foam, processed to take on the appearance of organic matter, which could very much be brain sulci. The balloon itself also is tainted by the polyfoam, a fitting allegory for how information to be recollected is also infiltrated by its material base at the moment of recollection. Another floor-based work, Shrouded cicatrix, 2023 layers a mesh veil and silicon approximation of the veil on one another. The two veils, both relinquished from their utilitarian function, are further alienated by their intimate positioning. In the end, neither has the ultimate claim to be the original. While a veil conjugates the thing it attempts to cover up in every sense of the word, here the two veils have nothing to conceal but each other, and to no avail.
Both suspended mid-air, Translucent fragility, 2024 strikes viewers as a wounded heart in working and Sudden atychiphobia, 2024 violently pours out its content, which could be vomit or psychical interjection, with a motion that could never reach its destiny. Leakage or rupture, eruption of contingency in its most visceral form, are Bodzy’s stand-ins for affect and our attraction to it. The persistence of revisiting the volatile materiality of our emotional life is elegantly reprised in the classical trinity of Crestfallen languor I, II, and III, 2024, latex containers of polyfoam interiority. Seemingly heavy and hanging by velvet rope, the works could well be female breasts burdened by milk. Elsewhere, Caustic retrogenesis, 2024 is a pair of nylon spandex that might upwardly stretch into high altitudes, only to be grounded by concrete, reminiscent of Senga Nengudi’s works on bodies in turmoil. In Perpetual murmur, 2024, we never know if the polyfoam-covered balloon collapsed from within or exploded outwardly, which is often the case with most of the balloon works in the exhibition, designating the paralyzing desire of retracing each step along the way.
Freely oscillating between schematics of materiality and categories of objects and delighting in the expansion and contraction of tensions and lifespans, Bodzy speaks around the contour of memory and its many twists and turns on the plane of psyche. The artist knows that should she understand how things stay or leave and how memory might or might not operate with highest fidelity, another order of things will come to pass. It’s a promise in the far horizon, for the present requires working through, again and over again.
Levity and Depth: Contrasts and Confluences in New Sculptures by Lesley Bodzy is open at M. David & Co. in Sunset Park, 214 40th Street, Brooklyn through March 31st, 2025.
You Might Also Like
Katya Grokhovsky on FANTASYLAND and a Decade of Making and Migrating
What's Your Reaction?
