BODY AND SOUL

FEBRUARY 2 - MARCH 15, 2019

VERY presents Body and Soul, an exhibition featuring Tory Fair, Audrey Goldstein, and Jill Slosburg-Ackerman. Each artist uses material relationships within their abstract sculptural works to describe the connection between the physical body and that which animates it— an accretion of memory, history, and a collective unconscious. The works seem to ask: How do the body and soul coexist? How do they exist separately and as a whole?

Composed of organic fragments, the insistent materiality of the works become an entry point into what exists beyond the physical world. In “Paperweight (marble)”, Tory Fair embeds what she calls personal sediment and detritus between layers of paper pulp, recalling the history buried within the earth or the accumulation of a life lived. A hunk of marble sits in the center of the piece as if to mark a resting place. Audrey Goldstein’s ghostly, wooden forms are held together only by hand-stitched silk. The silk both conceals and exposes the underlying structure, acting as “clothing” which simultaneously protects, provides support, and reveals its fragility. Jill Slosberg-Ackerman’s three-dimensional drawings are studies that represent her continued interest in the intersection of geometric and organic forms. Contained within a wooden frame, a stack of scrap wooden blocks piles up in the corner and mirrors a suspended felt cut-out. The contrast between the materials and their physical properties becomes a poetic meditation on the physical and spiritual realms.

Within the seemingly forthright and unfussy composition of the works, there is an order and balance at play. Each artist has an instinct to organize, to create logic from chaos, to make sense of their life through the seemingly arbitrary objects that inhabit it. What is history--personal or collective--but an organized assemblage of stories and objects? Body and Soul digs into the fundamental questions about who we are and what our lives are made of.