M.David & Co. is pleased to announce our summer exhibition, which features artists who participated in the online residencies of Glenn Goldberg, Jennifer Samet, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung.

Artists: Alena Ahrens, Elizabeth Awalt, Beverly Bajek, Edith Beatty, Marcy Bergeron-Noa, Connie Brown, Phyllis Famiglietti, Katherine Filice, Marianne Hall, Kathryn Hart, Cate Holt, Barry Katz, Kharis Kennedy, Barbara Laube, Janette Maxey, Mimi Moncier, Susan Newmark, Patricia O'Maille, Susan Poirier, Randy Jayne Rosenberg, Brandon Clay Smith, Carolyn Wenning

On a research trip to Serra da Capivara in Brazil, Zoë encountered a place where history itself is disputed: Human remains once thought to confirm the Bering Strait migration theory have since been re-dated far earlier, reopening questions about when and how South America’s first peoples arrived. In her first solo exhibition, pegadas (“footprints” in Portuguese), Zoë brings us along on this uncertain path toward a new kind of self-knowledge.

In pegadas, photographic wall projections situate us in dangerous but beautiful territory: epic canyons, craggy cave walls and rocky riverbeds. Life-sized soft sculptures stand sentinel, figures Zoë calls Tlapixqui (“guardians” in Nahuatl). This is her homemade alphabet writ large. They’re rendered in bright fabrics with vibrant, modern patterns which, under the hazy light of the projections, seem to flicker in and out of time. 

Wandering among these strange souls, I feel lost again. There still isn’t a clear path forward. But the difference this time is that I feel welcomed by these guardians. They don’t seem eager to send me on my way. What once functioned as a private system of navigation becomes a shared experience—one where getting lost is not a failure, but an opening.

Exhibition text by Patrick Bower, a multidisciplinary artist living and working in New York City.

For the artist, it all comes down to a process of exploration and reiteration,

devotion and discovery. In Shaffer’s own words:

“My process is both random and deliberate. My aim is always to discover new worlds and find new ways to explore. It’s all about looking into myself and out into the world to see what things may be, what secrets they might hold, and to find a way forward.”

— Exhibition text by Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D.

• Apple (Inverted Triangle):

  • Bust is larger than the hips, and the waist is less defined.

  • Weight tends to be carried around the stomach and upper body.

• Rectangle (Straight):

  • Shoulders, waist, and hips have a similar width.

  • Minimal definition at the waist, creating a more uniform shape.

• Inverted triangle:

  • Broad shoulders and a narrow waist and hips.

  • Typically an athletic build with more muscle definition in the upper body.

• Athletic:

  • A more muscular body with less body fat and more definition, often with a straight silhouette.

• Lollipop:

  • A larger bust with a smaller waist and hips, creating a top-heavy look. 

  • Spells .....Hourglasspearrectangleinvertedtriangleblob 

Savage's brilliance is her recontextualizing of these sexist definitions of the female form. Through the beauty and force of her production, she makes evident that each body type is unique, and that all body shapes are beautiful beyond the male gaze and its facile and dangerous characterizations and stereotypes.

So walk this wild labyrinth, this complicated, irregular network of passages and paths, to find one's way through this transformed space, the questions posed, this path of subversion, where righteous anger is whispered, made manifest through its mix of humor, grace, and delight, elevated and made most human.

Bodzy’s interests in material convergence and thematic divergence furnish the aesthetic backbone for Levity and Depth, the artist’s solo exhibition of new sculptures at M. David & Co. Gallery. Working in her studios in New York City and Houston, Bodzy has created a multivalent body of work conceived, for the purposes of the exhibition, as a large-scale, site-specific installation featuring, on the one hand, counterbalanced couplings of formally interconnected pieces and, on the other, counterpointing aggregations of autonomous objects. Arranged in various configurations from floor to ceiling, Bodzy’s curiously amorphous, bizarrely bulbous works hover and loom in her capacious workspaces, dangling around and sprawling about in an atmosphere of cavernous shadow-play, suspended kinetics, and ecstatic, somewhat sci-fi theatrics. Many of the hanging works feature balloons in variable states of full or partial inflation, or even impact-suggestive deflation, ostensibly the material consequence of subjection to pour-overs, sprays, drizzlings, and somewhat contained yet forceful dumpings of interactive materials such as resin, acrylic paint, and polyurethane foam. While materials such as these evidence a degree of chemical sameness given their shared essential properties as plastics, their existence in very differently inert or activated states at the moment of incorporation into the creative process – solids and pseudo-solids, liquids of various weights and viscosities, gaseous billows and expansions, stretchy elastics – ensure that they’ll react to, counteract, and interact with one another, catalyzing formal and material destabilization and metamorphosis before settling into place, balancing each other out, establishing a level of functionally stable equilibrium. Bodzy’s sculptures are thus the consequence and embodiment of all this pushing and pulling, inflating and deflating, eventually curing and cohering activity. Oppositional yet resolvable forces are captured in, laid bare by, and remain readily identifiable through the resulting works.

Rather less identifiable, however, is what these objects are, or what they might be intended to be. Their formal aspects register as both vaguely familiar and otherworldly. Their multivalent plastic-ness is plain enough, but they also seem to cosplay as various other material realities: ceramics, blown glass, organic curiosities, mineral deposits, extracted and preserved organs. For Bodzy, such elusive identifiability is the point. Most simply, the sculptures are what they are, or what they turned out to be, by dint of the instantiation and working-out of material processes. The artist’s aim is for the sculptures to serve as abstracted vessels of the themes of contradiction, paradox, and incongruity that inspire her, while also furnishing tangible attestation to the possibility of resolution. Bodzy seeks also to convey with them something of the mysteries of life and death, and the effects of time and aging on the body, as well as an array of related dualities: inhalation and exhalation, accretion and secretion, intention and chance, rawness and refinement, natural and artificial, beautiful and abject, sensual and unemotional, shiny polish and goopy mess. In palette and form alike, flesh-tone works such as Translucent Fragility, Instinctual Sciamachy, and Rancorous Glare appear to carry these themes with a sense of carnal vitality and apparent lightness, while larger, more formally complex and chromatically heavier pieces such as Diaphanous Nebula, Unsteady Contingency, and Multiplicitous Instances hint at these matters much more enigmatically, and with substantial weightiness and gravitas. The yields of so many reactive processes, interactive forces, and invasive interventions, Bodzy’s sculptures attain modes of enduring rest in states of deeply curious elegance. 

In Levity and Depth, Lesley Bodzy makes a prodigious display of counterpoints and distinctions, incongruities and divergences, and contrasts and differences. But she also makes plain that interconnections are inherent to such circumstances as well, and that resolution and equilibrium can be wholly plausible if not inevitable outcomes of resistive processes. In Bodzy’s sculptures, semantic and formal abstractions find expressive resolve through experimental actions and material interactions. Their curiously restful allure lures you into looking, and their deeply nuanced look lures you into lingering. 

These artists’ practices are as rooted in confidence and intention as they are in experimentation and impulse – the traits that stoke the burn that fuels the churn. For this group of seasoned makers, their common creative recipe is tried and true: Know what you’re cooking. Never cook it the same way twice. Remix ingredients and methods. And remember there’s always a novel way to cook it up – or something new to cook altogether. 

It’s not a recipe these artists arrived at overnight. As is the case for many artists, it’s an exploratory ethos that results from a mixed bag of creative experiences – from a lifetime of working instinctively and by trial and error, to mentoring and training inside and outside of institutional settings, to developing skills honed through various personal and professional pursuits that eventually make their way into artistic expression in the studio, especially once it’s possible for a devoted studio practice to become a primary focus. This same mixed bag of experiences is also one that, for some artists – despite how genuinely enriching such a nonlinear creative background can be – might nonetheless lead to limited exhibition opportunities or exposure in the art world, particularly when one’s artistic practice is held in check by family life and family loss, personal and interpersonal tribulations, and variable modes or extended periods of social or geographical isolation. Pursuing a professional path as an artist is ridden with circumstantial challenges even without so many additional limitations, so the sum total can amount to quite a lot to overcome. Nurturing material enthusiasms, however, and staying active in the studio by staying actively curious, can make many such real limitations seem immaterial. 

It’s no surprise then that the artists in Dioramas in Dialogue, given their common ground in mixed-bag artistic recipes and diversified, at times challenging creative backgrounds, operate within a shared sphere of assorted, bountifully expressive abstract aesthetics and narrative thematics. These characteristics are readily identifiable for each artist individually and for the group of six as a whole, and they come into particularly delightful, formally complementary focus through the collaborative installations they’ve developed by working in pairs. To this end, the artists’ aim was to convey a sense of shared staging, dioramic interplay, and implicit dialogue among their works. Hence Marilyn Banner’s profoundly spirited, loosely delineated figurations on richly textured raw surfaces, casually accented with loosened threads splayed out at the fringes, alongside Cynthia Sparrenberger’s charismatic sculptural characters, including a sassy rabbit strutting along like a tiny giant storming onto the scene, with a cheerfully defiant gait, from an unseen land of make-believe at stage left. Hence, too, Ellen Anthony’s rustically charming, theatrically charged bricolage sculptures perched and dangling, as if idling in wait in an obscure puppet master’s secret workshop, among Patricia O’Maille’s nimbly rendered, soulfully folkloric, storybook-suggestive apparitions that seem to have emerged wholesale, with human and avian likenesses, onto vintage-like papers from some mystical ether. And hence, as well, Claudia Renfro’s deftly embroidered, colorfully embellished, fabulously animated tableaus of cartoonish figurations fantastically rejoicing in whimsical reverie, parading around next to Phyllis Famiglietti’s painstakingly assembled, sympathetically amusing composite sculptures that scan as humbly engineered toys or elemental automatons discovered on the tool-cluttered workbench of an inspired tinkerer. 

The artworks in Dioramas in Dialogue inhabit a world of intrigue, imagination, and mystery where the preciousness of life and fundamentality of fun have been lost on no one. It’s a place where quieted acoustics whisper variable narratives that present as visually vociferous, even raucous. In this collaborative exhibit, the artworks on display are in contextual dialogue with one another while speaking to viewers individually, jointly, and collectively, with an array of potential narratives lingering among them. Some such stories are hinted at by the artists themselves in their artworks’ titles, as well as in the rich and insightful reflections they composed about one another’s works on occasion of this special show. There’s a lot to explore and interpret in Dioramas in Dialogue, and a lot to relish. Unambiguous throughout is that harnessing the creative spark of joy – a long-sought, hard-fought-for, and hard-won recipe for success – is an indispensable part of the artistic process.

Just as shadows themselves can manifest in manifold ways according to shifting circumstances, so too can expressions of, and understandings gained through, shadow selves. Such aspects of self might be those we conceal or obscure in order to shroud them in secrecy. They might be matters we strive to unknow or bury through modes of suppression. They might be memories or characteristics we acknowledge as extant, yet consider to be of secondary importance or presence – as impressions of things we bear in mind, or impressions we believe to have left behind. Our shadow selves might also be those we come to terms with, over time, by sharpening our senses of self-awareness, or by simply becoming more comfortable in our own skin. This might entail recognizing an interdependent rapport between our objective realities and how we shed light upon them, alter their forms, trace their contours, construe them for what they are, or try to illuminate them in revelatory ways through modes of cognitive, or perhaps artistic, abstraction. 

The featured artists in Shadow Selves – Susan Luss, Hannah Ehrlich, and Louise Noël – bring all such concerns to bear in this tightly curated exhibition of assemblage sculptures, site-specific installations, and works on paper. Working in a range of media yet within a markedly kindred aesthetic, these artists take into consideration craft traditions and labor norms; notions of self as contained by and refracted through the body; the layered histories of objects and materials, especially through acts of upcycling, alteration, and repurposing; and variable expressions of corporeality and female agency.

Luss, Ehrlich, and Noël position themselves as active conduits of familial histories, childhood memories, personal experiences, contemporary social and political issues, and variably inflected visions of the future, and they channel these diverse themes into their art. The creative selves they carry into their work become marks made, forms configured, figures hidden and found, gestures transposed, and energies transferred. As such, the visual yields of these processes of transference are where their notions of self emerge, cohere, and come to the fore. Rather than hiding, or hiding from, their shadow selves, these artists opt to embrace, collaborate with, and learn from them – and to convey traces of them to receptive viewers. 

This sense of collaboration is of paramount importance for all three artists. Theirs is a metaphorical understanding of the term; they interpret it as a practice of collaboration not with other artists to make artwork, but as a collaborative mindset in their relationship with their operative materials, concepts, and circumstances. Rather than merely implementing these things in their work, they imagine themselves engaging with, acting through, and working alongside them. For Susan Luss, collaboration entails working with light, surfaces, an array of liquid media, various types of mark-making techniques, and all manner of fluctuating spatial considerations in the creation of colorful, large-scale textile installations. In As Above, So Below, a sprawling horizontal work designed with site-specific alterability in mind, the artist’s chromatic muse is a range of mostly deep blues, and her expansive, gesturally restive marks are circular, radial, astral, loosely linear, dispersive, and constellational. Surface texture, ambient light, and formal interruptions become crucial aspects of this immersive work’s visual experience through the artist’s carefully considered deployment of drapery, pleating, and folds, such that the shadows resulting from registers of relief become linear interventions in their own right – linearities of variable lightnesses and depths, all consistently subject to change according to transient luminosities. Luss considers her body and the canvas to be one and the same while working, the latter ostensibly molding around the former before emerging as a form of its own. The yields of these multifarious processes here, from the making of marks to the metaphorically molded forms, present as a mysteriously rendered map of the night sky – a vast diffusion of nebular dusts settling into place according to some unknowable force of cosmic ordering. 

Relief shadows, limited palettes, site-specificity, large scales, and a collaborative relationship with surfaces and materials are key concerns for Hannah Ehrlich as well. Working with repurposed doilies to create somewhat gently imposing, organically expansive sculptural installations that crawl up, down, all along, and off of walls, sometimes meandering down and out to creep along floors as well, Ehrlich imagines her artwork to be a collaboration with history, too, and tradition – a sense of collaboration that means working with, but also reworking, working through, and working against. In Never Alone: Accompanied by Grief, the artist seeks to extract beauty from the shadowy depths of a dolorous spectrum of emotive experience. Ehrlich dips individual doilies in black gesso and mounts them together – one at a time into sections, then one section at a time into broadened extensions – resulting in elegantly amorphous outgrowths that appear to proliferate as biomorphically multicellular units, pulsating insistently with enigmatic vitality. And yet, given their pitch-like aspect, these vacillating units also seem to mark the waning or vestiges of life. The artist incorporates other black-gessoed materials into the doily structure as well, while also suturing selected areas together with a free-flowing, non-conforming, rule-breaking crochet technique. For Ehrlich, repurposing doilies and reinterpreting crochet, both emblematic of a vast array of weaving histories, are tantamount to reclaiming craft traditions materially while undermining or reforming them conceptually – deploying very differently, even proactively exploiting a questionable index of femininity by reappropriating and reconfiguring it from the ground up. 

While Louise Noël shares many of the same conceptual concerns and ideas of material collaboration with Ehrlich and Luss, her relationship to scale, expressive registers, and implicit references to corporeality are quite different. Noël’s series of assemblage sculptures collectively titled Je ne connais pas son nom (I Do Not Know Their Name) are utterly spare, skeletally present, and delicately displayed – hanging lightly from the ceiling, as if incidentally, or dangling openly before walls, as if drying out. Indeed, an image of makeshift clotheslines here is not inapplicable, as Noël’s source materials are unmistakably aged, wholly reconfigured, nimbly repurposed articles of clothing. The artist’s use of previously owned garments is a cultivated choice. For her, these items have not only been owned and used by others – and unknown others, at that – but they have also covered those others’ bodies in one way or another, adorning or even protecting them, taking on their forms and contours, perhaps even preserving traces of their oils in their fibers. As such, these garments carry forth something of their previous owners’ identity even in their owners’ absence – material shells as shadow selves, auratic manifestations of disembodied otherness. Noël works meticulously to turn blouses and other pieces into peacefully ghostlike presences that scan as line drawings both materially and immaterially – the remnant linearity of the material of the articles of clothing, and the shiftily linear suggestiveness of the shadows they cast. Noël collaborates with the garments’ histories and, at a remove, with the garments’ erstwhile owners to breathe new life into items that have fallen into disuse. Consequently, the pieces themselves, no longer fallen but raised into space, collaborate with the shadows they cast to flesh out and enhance one another’s salient attributes. The spareness of form and senses of silhouette-like, shadowy substantiality inherent to Noël’s assemblages are palpable in her scrupulously crafted works on paper as well, in which rich, intuitively applied washes of walnut ink appear patently abstract yet innately figurative. 

In Shadow Selves, senses of self, senses of others’ selves, and senses of othered selves come into material confluence. As evidenced by their works in this carefully curated show, Susan Luss, Hannah Ehrlich, and Louise Noël employ and collaborate with shadows both real and metaphorical to suggest the presence of bodies where bodies no longer are, and to illuminate lingering traces of histories that were – and that might yet, in reconfigured forms, endure. Shadowy aspects of self might be held in secret, suppressed, or obscured. Yet they might also be channeled into artworks to free them from the shade of confinement – releasing them into the world to cast revelatory light on life.