what it is about you

that closes and opens

Working across media including sculpture, film, textile, photography and performance, the artists in this exhibition foreground the body’s gestural repertoire in a series of unique encounters.  In its own way, each represents an (in)expressive vector of gender. Gathered together, they express softness, tenderness, resistance, refusal, illegibility, diffusion, and invitation in turn.

The exhibition’s title is taken from a poem by ee cummings, in which he proclaims “i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens.” While for cummings, this closing and opening is amorous, the push and pull that the poem teases out is present in every moment of our social lives; we all close and open ourselves as we move through the world, in ways that are intimate, social and political. There is both tenderness and violence threaded through these works. To be closed or opened holds potential for both; perhaps it is the very possi

bility of violence that makes the act of being open so intimate. Within each work, the body communicates, subverts expectations, troubles definitions, affirms and/or redefines itself. These works evoke gestural languages in the very movement of closing or opening.

 

Artists:

Odette England

Zak Foster

Camilo Godoy

Sharon Hayes

Nadia Huggins

Clementine Keith-Roach

Danica I. J. Knežević

Freya Powell

Sable Elyse Smith

Kenneth Tam

Curated by Macushla Robinson

 

Closing February 20, 2024

Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery

John Jay College of Criminal Justice

860 11th Avenue, New York, NY, 10019

Gallery hours: 10am – 5pm, Monday to Friday

what it is about you that closes and opens Working across media including sculpture, film, textile, photography and performance, the artists in this exhibition foreground the body’s gestural repertoire in a series of unique encounters.  In its own way, each represents an (in)expressive vector of gender. Gathered together, they express softness, tenderness, resistance, refusal, illegibility, […]