nothin Making Art From Golden Glue | New Haven Independent

Making Art From Golden Glue

Anahita Vossoughi

Caterpillar.

A mound of flesh, skin stretched by clips. Livid coloration, like a bruise.

Caterpillar is an entry into Anahita Vossoughi’s Beige Thick Golden Glue,” an exhibit running at Artspace on Orange and Crown until June 30. Created over the past two years,” as the accompanying literature explains, these works continue Vossoughi’s career-long investigation into the anxiety of the contemporary body and its anatomy, asking how and why bodies are fashioned, manipulated, maintained, imagined, and represented by the self and others.” What do we do to ourselves for other people? Why do we do it?

The questions — especially in our current political climate — become that much more pointed when Vossoughi addresses them to women. In artspeak, Vossoughi proposes a new ambivalent language for an aesthetics of desire and fetish written by and for women.” It’s about wanting things, and about wanting control over wanting things. It’s about who gets to make the decisions, and what for. And placed in this context, the pieces in this exhibit speak.

At first glance, Caterpillar feels like an accusation, evidence of the damage done, to women by men, by society. It’s a piece of disembodied flesh, blackened and bloodied, severed from something. But, as the title suggests, there’s possibility in its formlessness. What else could it turn into, if given time? What could happen if the rules that govern how we present ourselves to others change — or if we change them? How might changing the rules change us?

Legs 4 Gloeden.

Vossoughi’s artistic project has some historical context, as a few of the pieces in the exhibit grapple with artists from the past. In particular, as the accompanying literature states, Vossoughi takes on German Romanticist Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856 – 1931), who spent his life traveling to Italy to photograph nude boys and young men of Mediterranean descent.”

The image that’s been manipulated in Legs 4 Gloeden is from von Gloeden’s own work. The accompanying literature states that Vossoughi’s take on von Gloeden is calling out for new discourse on contemporary forms of Orientalism … the collages do not offer resolution, nor do they impart moral judgement on their maker or the viewer. Rather, they serve as starting points for visualizing landscapes of sensuality, obsession, and freedom, that realize, with knowingness, the power dynamics that made von Gloeden’s photographs possible.”

That’s heady stuff, but it makes sense. There is something playful, too, in Vossoughi’s approach to the older photographs. I’m onto you, she seems to say. I can see what makes you tick. There’s a pent-up energy in the collage that suggests that Vossoughi and her contemporaries have it in them to dance circles around their predecessors, to imagine new ways of looking at one another, of connecting with one another, if only we’re given the chance.

Golden Staples Sit Squat (l.) and Shimmer, Bleach, Pulse (r.).

That dynamism is on full display in the two centerpieces of the exhibit, Golden Staples Sit Squat and Shimmer, Bleach, Pulse, which amplify both the grotesque nature of Caterpillar and its sense of possible transformation. Viewed one way, both pieces can be read as almost grisly, like blurry photos of crime scenes, visceral, horrifying, and hard to look away from. But there’s also a sense that these pieces are changing before our eyes. If we visited them the next day, they may have lost some appendages, grown new ones, maybe even sprouted wings. Embedded in that is the idea that there are new ways of desiring, of being desirable — in some sense, new forms of beauty — waiting to be discovered. We just have some work to do first.

Beige Thick Golden Glue” runs at Artspace, 50 Orange St., through June 30. Click here for hours and more information.

Sign up for our morning newsletter

Don't want to miss a single Independent article? Sign up for our daily email newsletter! Click here for more info.


Post a Comment

Commenting has closed for this entry

Comments

There were no comments