Wrong’s Let Me Hear Your Body Talk pairs artists Joey Fauerso and Gyan Shrosbree in a dialoguing contrast of dayglo and black and white, united by a mutual interest in fractured figuration. This show is one of piecey portraiture, whether witnessed in Shrosbree’s reclining femmes surrounded by boots and botanicals or Fauerso’s cutouts of body parts. The show is split between Wrong’s two Marfa, Texas, outposts: a downtown retail shop and a former church space named the “Do-right Hall” in a residential neighborhood. This casual crosstown layout echoes the elements of fracture found in Fauerso’s disembodied forms as well as Shrosbree’s multipanel installations.
Let Me Hear Your Body Talk is defined by this sense of scattering on almost every level: amid much larger unstretched panels of landscape and figuration, Fauerso has arranged a series of cutout wooden and fiberboard pieces on the floors of the former chapel (a log, a head, a foot), in addition to a slew of cheekily amputated noses in the downtown section of the exhibition. The effect is a chaotic cohesiveness in the spaces echoed by Shrosbee’s many small stretched canvases containing abstract botanical forms.
This trend is repeated in “Early to Rise” (2019), wherein a long string of daisy-chained, cut canvas, disembodied faces drape from ceiling to floor between two small cathedral windows. The rightmost of these windows contains a simple installation of two slender cutout figures facing one another pasted high against the arcing of the fenestration, and an abstract metal sculpture more notable for its cutout absences than its formal presences.
Meanwhile, Shrosbree’s paintings feature a tableau of pieced-together figures and disembodied forms, all in a bright, enthusiastic palette which complements Fauerso’s tendency toward the monochrome. Hers is a decidedly femme-centric portraiture, with the predominant, singular figures featuring billowing shoulders and bodily curvatures which overwhelm the harder edges of geometric backdrop. Here, femme forms are placed front and center, replete with a palette that emphasizes the vibrancy of that lived experience.
Fauerso also cuts a balance between the geometric and the organic in her “Consider the Other Kingdoms” (2022), a tabletop sculpture functioning as painting. A draped canvas awash with monochrome texture covers the table-as-plinth-as-substrate. An array of welded, open geometric forms cut into this wash, their bases consisting of separate, monochromatic paintings in their own right. Given that platonic solids always seem to take on a different meaning in Marfa-as-Minimalist-Mecca, the piece feels made for this site. It is yet another instance of fracture: this time less figurative but no less bodily-oriented (if we are to take Minimalism’s lessons on relational presence into account).
Meanwhile my focus returns to Shrosbree’s work, which oscillates between small stretched canvases and tapestry-like wall-based works. Within the stretched frames lie botanical portraits of succulents, while in the flag-like tapestries’ bifurcated figurative femme forms are flanked by cats that resemble ghosts, shoes that resemble cats, and blobs of form in-between. The shoes are prolific, and while at first I considered them to be simply representative of strewn about articles of clothing, in the context of Fauerso’s disembodied pieces, I couldn’t help but wonder if they were something a little more body horror, in spite of their cheery rendering and palette.
While much of the work is unstretched, Shrosbree’s flag-like works — replete with visible grommets — particularly shine as paintings-cum-tapestries. While they feel scaled down compared to Fauerso’s featured paintings, their informal yet ceremonious demeanor strikes a commanding and compelling pose. Despite the radical departures in color, the two bodies of work by the paired artists play well together for their respective interests and the figurative, the botanical, the animal.
Let Me Hear Your Body Talk continues at Wrong Store and Gallery (110 North Highland Avenue, Marfa, Texas) through May 8, 2022. The exhibition was collaboratively curated by the artists and the gallery.
0 Commentaires