YveYANG is pleased to present Bodies, reciprocal motions, a group exhibition featuring five 2023 graduates of Yale School of Art’s Master of Fine Arts program in Sculpture: Camilla Carper, Anat Keinan, Younes Koudier, SR Lejeune, and Stephen Lordan. The exhibition runs from June 3rd through July 1st, with a public reception on Saturday, June 3rd from 6 to 8 pm.
Bodies, reciprocal motions examines how the selected sculptures choreograph the visitor’s experiences to navigate the actions, reactions, and counterreactions sparked between the gallery’s spatial body, the visitor’s perceiving body, and the artist’s individual creating body. This reciprocal system of motions welcomes the viewer to literalize the sculpture’s potential energy in their movements and traverse the work’s conceptual landscape in contemplation. Reversely, the viewer’s perceptual journey remodels the artworks as not merely the embodiment of the artist’s creating selves, but also enables new interpretations. As such, Bodies, reciprocal motions incubates a system in which the artworks enter a dialectic relationship with the viewers, albeit occupying different spatio-temporal positions and sensorial planes.
Camilla Carper’s Reset Control (2023) offers testimony to Carper’s laborious process of production/performance that escapes and redefines the boundaries of the gallery body. The work’s suspended presence juxtaposes with its referent, Carper’s six-month “dressing project,” during which the artist wore the same pair of silk pajamas every night, while gradually recording the colors of the garments they wore during the day onto pajamas with screen print ink. SR Lejeune disperses pieces of manually machined brass “corners,” rounding (2023), throughout the gallery space not only to acknowledge existing corners in an act of discovery, but also to invite viewers to create and re-construct corners, broadly defined. Unlike rounding’s unyielding presence denoted by opaque metal, Lejeune’s skylight (2023) offers the viewers a wavering image of the artist’s painted sky reflected from the work’s 25-degree-tilted mirror-polished stainless steel placed on the ground level.
As the visitors navigate their bodies around the sloped structure of Anat Keinan’s Practice (2023), they synchronize their movements with the piece’s diagonal dynamism and a hidden machine body, propelled by running gears and motors. These movements are then counterbalanced by a leveling tool embedded in an unmoved gallery wall. Younes Koudier’s scent-infused handcrafted doll Panther Angel (2021), along with his video installation Pantheress Heart (2023), reveals the possibility of a perceiving body not only as a visual and moving being, but also in the acts of smelling, touching, listening, imagining, and sympathizing. Weaving himself through layers of bodies, Koudier harmonizes olfactory, poetic, ritualistic, and mythological experiences in his celebration of color, sensuality, and motherland.
By bringing forward the potential energy in yet-to-hatched eggs, Stephen Lordan’s Egg Bath (2022) ironically embodies a rejuvenating healing power at the cost of fracturing pains and the (un)birth of the unknown. The cooked eggs are bathed in pseudo-bodily-fluid, which contains Himalayan salt and calamine lotion, a medication made from powdered minerals to treat skin irritation.
Photo Courtesy YveYANG Gallery
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