INCISION

January 31st - March 16th, 2018

Featured Artists: Chaya Babu, Christen Clifford, Camille Lee, Katherine Toukhy

Incision was an exhibition of works by Chaya Babu, Christen Clifford, Camille Lee, and Katherine Toukhy. The multidisciplinary artists featured in the exhibition were part of the 2017/2018 GRAB BACK: Feminist In Residence program, and had been working at Project for Empty Space since autumn 2017. 

Both metaphorically and physically speaking, the female body is often a site that evokes and provokes physical manipulation beyond its own control. Artists such as Barbara Kruger famously remind us that the female body is, in fact, a battleground. The female/female identified body is forced to contend with the chronic possibility of being the site for a form of violence, rupture, and forced manipulation. The exhibition Incision explored how the female body becomes the site for violence and vitality, and everything in between. It probed at the various methods and consequences of navigating the world as a female body. And, it subsequently confronted itself by challenging the very notion that the female body can be comprehended as merely just a body.  

Incision was an exhibition comprising four independent projects that extracted the very personal experiences of each artist. Each experience(s) was flayed open and laid vulnerable for the sole purpose of contributing to the beautiful and frenzied cacophonous cry for empathy and justice. Chaya Babu’s work layered images of her recent myomectomy against a life of continuously evolving awareness of intersecting identities. The raw images of her healing laceration and hint of pubic hair were only obscured enough by bandages to remind the audience that this site of violence was one created with a purpose to heal and repair.

Christen Clifford’s interactive works presented some of the most intimate intrusions into the female body. Two of her works were immersive interactive installations. A sound piece contained in a dark crevice of the gallery was an encounter with a form of ultraviolence and its consequences. The adjacent installation, a composition of pink mirrors and layered videos, evoked a sense of safety and beauty. It pushed the viewer to welcome the idea of the body beyond the societal constructs and expectations. Paired together, these two works presented vastly different examples of how the female form is consumed and embraced within our culture.

Camille Lee and Katherine Toukhy’s works explored the ways in patriarchy metastasizes to obstruct the female body, and challenged it at every turn. Lee’s piece reflected upon the experience of ‘becoming an American woman.’ The work pulled from the artist’s personal experience with navigating the immigration system. She unpacked the myriad of idealistic and almost unattainable expectations that she was presented with, and analyzed the deeper meaning behind what it means to be part of the American dream.

Katherine Toukhy’s soft-media installation explored body and identity within the context of statelessness and movement. Assembled in an aqueous wash of geographically ambiguous blues, her headless figures spoke to the anonymity or erasure of humanity from the female form. Toukhy questioned the repercussions of nationalistic violence, chaos, and upheaval as it pertains to the female form. The azure spread was indeterminate in its intention; perhaps the skull-less women existed in a space of serene amniotic transcendence, or maybe they drowned within the tumult of an unknown sea. Perhaps they were both, as with so many of the works, existing in the space where both violence and healing were present within one space- the female body.