Latex Anxiety
Hannah Levy at Casey Kaplan
Untitled, 2020.
Edward Weston photographed the luscious curves of squash and peppers as an abstracted means of evoking the sumptuousness of the female body. Hannah Levy, in her solo show Pendulous Picnic at Casey Kaplan Gallery, begins from the same point (an intense focus on vegetables, that is), but ends up in a far more disturbing place, emphasizing the grotesque side of our grocery haul. In one gallery space, oversized asparagus spears languidly perched atop metal rods look as if they’ve sprouted fingers in place of leaves, while elsewhere gooseneck gourds become nubbly disease-ridden phalluses. All are fashioned in fleshy colored latex, a counterpoint to Weston’s elegant black and white. This monochrome is repugnant rather than alluring.
Untitled, 2020.
There are disembodied breasts in this show, and while yes, I did criticize their use as a motif in my previous post, these nipples are laden with meaning. They are literally valves—like the ones which populated your youthful summers by the water, when your not-yet-capacious child lungs were tasked with blowing up the pool float. In looking at this work (whose many teats hang at around head height, as if we were piglets ready for suckling), the female breast isn’t an empty signifier of “femininity,” but rather a reminder of a (mostly) universal experience of feeding at our mothers’ breasts.
Untitled, 2020.
The horror and pleasure of this return, however, is distinctly Freudian— and this deeply felt perversity (not only in that we have been weaned, but in that this is, in fact, not our mother’s breast, but rather an aestheticized, anesthetized latex sculpture) infuses all other objects on display. For example, what appears as pocked chicken skin—eminently touchable—makes up the shade of another “chandelier.” In reaching out to touch it, however, you might suddenly step back, reminded of Lady Lazarus’s Nazi lampshade.
Accompanying these sculptures in a nearby alcove are two photographs cropped at close range, in which perfectly manicured hands prepare a fishing lure. If you have ever felt a worm jolt and writhe the moment you press its slick, languid body into the point of a hook, you know what life is and how it pulses in even the most lowly of creatures.
Untitled, 2020.
In these sculptures we approach death, decay, the draining of life-like color from limbs, and flesh suspended as if from meat hooks, while glinting chrome bones pull at taut bloodless skin. All this might seem macabre, but I couldn’t help thinking that there is also something life affirming about these sculptures, in how polished and weighty they are—they must have taken a lot of time and care to make.
Even on the brink of sterility, they still have something to say, and in that way they are not completely unlike our worm.
Casey Kaplan Gallery
Until February 29