me, my flesh & I
Artists: Beck Baker, enjay binnie, Leilani Chia, Eye Fleur, Kanako Enokida, Megan Mushin Gardner, Chris Hagen, Ruby MacGregor, Yo Murray, Sachi Orrock, Braelyn Rolfe-Chase, Spot Willows, and Hamish Wilson
Curator: Sachi Orrock
Me, My Flesh, & I explores relationships to and between fleshy forms, pondering the many ways in which we encounter, experience, and consume meaty bodies. In this space, each artist chips away at the countless mythologies that cling to flesh, asking viewers to consider what it truly means to be made of meat.
Butchery and beauty, cuteness and cannibalism, pleasure and pain, desire and disgust - each duplicity is embedded in flesh-based beings. Before the hungry gaze of viewers, these duplicities are emphasised - lured into the spotlight through photography, performance, sound, textiles, sculpture, and more.
Across each unique practice represented here, flesh is replenished, demolished, devoured, and transformed, bearing lasting marks of countless histories and futures. Our skins are fragile, time-keeping costumes - existing both as a fortified barrier and our most vulnerable surface. Memories of lives to come and lives that have passed are carved into these surfaces. They change the shape of the outfit, morphing it constantly at an uneven, unpredictable pace.
As it regenerates and degenerates around its skeletal host, flesh is watched, poked, sniffed, licked, hunted, and digested. Our worlds revolve around it. We are preoccupied constantly with it - how it looks, how it feels, what it smells like, what it tastes like encounter these bodies with care; sip at their words slowly and deliberately, being sure to savour that taste.
Work on display:
Crescent Skin, 2024
clothing, textile, acrylic, irrigation, clay
Crescent Skin, 2024
clothing, textile, acrylic, irrigation, clay
[didactic written by Sachi]
‘Crescent Skin is a layered textile piece by artist Yo Murray, made to echo the visuality and physical sensation of fingernails dug into flesh. The layered clothes and discarded fabrics, sliced, dyed, and stitched together, hang limply - suspended to reveal their crescent-moon incisions. As time passes, the works’ textured surface transforms - soft blooms of darkness appear and disappear intermittently, created by an irrigation system which saturates the fabric from behind. This work becomes a landscape of worn, mottled flesh caught in time - gripped with fervour, marked, and then released, allowing the blood beneath to travel freely once more and the skin itself to resume its prior shape. The active feeling of being pierced by fingernails is one remembered by most bodies; to look down and see the shy crescent curves decorating your flesh, prickling still with the pain of the action that made them. Crescent Skin plays with this tactile memory, engaging each body that approaches it - inviting flesh to reminisce.’
image documentation by IG@soggybreadissad
