About the Exhibition

Curated by Dan Gunn

Reception: Thursday, June 12, 6-8pm, Artist Talk: Saturday, July 12, 1pm

My Hands Are My Bite is an exhibition of four female artists—Lilli Carré, Laura Davis, Carol Jackson, and Diane Simpson—who employ a formal poly-temporality and purposeful engagement with vintage decorative modes. Their respective styles vary, from Art Deco flourishes of the Gilded Age, to the materials of the American frontier, and the International Style Modernism and the blended folk Americana. In the collision of the handmade and the found, the reality of before and after, the old and the new dissolve leaving a distilled and vulnerable form of style for consideration.

The title of the exhibition comes from a work by Laura Davis that references Gabriel Orozco’s My Hands Are My Heart (1991). In Davis’ work, the aesthetics of Mod become a theater of small scale objects and inscribed intricacies. The artist combines structures of store display and the corporeal bodies of fashion mannequins into tableaus of historical association. For Lilli Carré, the individual is always under construction. In books, animations, sequential drawings, and porcelain ceramic figures the person is always a fragile body; a little too pliable, in need of constant catharsis. Diane Simpson’s work is a meditation on structure that considers the meaning and history of decorative forms. For Simpson, Art Deco forms become models for androgynous new primary forms. An interest in early American industrialization and its mythic Western frontier informs Carol Jackson’s work. In Jackson’s recent sculpture, anachronistic forms drawn from Americana sheet music collide with webcam imagery taken from national park archives.

In My Hands Are My Bite, the charge for nostalgia reads as a modernist epithet for skepticism of progress. In their respective ways, Simpson, Jackson, Davis, and Carré work to revive overlooked aspects of human existence. Their coordinates are our coordinates, the consumer landscape of commerce, fashion, décor, architecture, and style. My Hands Are My Bite is on view through August 2, 2014, at moniquemeloche.