Contributed by Fintan Boyle / A sense of serious satire has pervaded Nancy Davidson’s work for years, and it is on prominent display in her show “Braids, Eggs, and Legs: A Wandering,” installed in two large galleries at Catskill Art Space alongside Matt Nolen’s work. Davidson has long been a fan of morselized language and sundered bodies, which in theory would make her work fertile ground for the psychoanalytically inclined. Yet here she elides the sexual menace and violence that, say, Melanie Klein offers. Instead, she wanders, as her title announces.
Even so, her root source might be Eden: the apple, the snake, the eviction. Davidson picks up the narrative somewhere after the initial exile, with a nod to James Joyce’s Ulysses – which she embraced during Covid lockdown – and thus to the Homeric journey that returns to the place it began. While the cycle of Leopold Bloom’s meanderings around Dublin informed Davidson’s thinking for this show, the image most directly lifted from the text, almost hidden in plain sight, is the “ashphant:”: Joyce’s neologism for a walking stick crafted from a stout shaft of ash, which she calls a hecatesstick in the eponymous sculpture.
The sculpture is merged into the installation titled Source, which covers half of one of the galleries. It evokes entryways, perhaps a proscenium arch. Source, like much of Davidson’s work, incorporates a lurid palette that can seem to run against nature, which Hecatestick only reinforces. The wooden walking stick has a kryptonite glow, translucent and mint green. Davidson also puts mythology to work. In Greek antiquity, Hecate was a god associated with sorcery and necromancy and perforce with thresholds – places in between places, times between times, transitions from one thing to another, like twilight and consonant with Davidson’s interest in dismantling expectations. This she does by parodying what is expected. She appreciates the subversive power of humor, and knows how to wield exaggeration, excess, and amplification. With this seasoned strategy, she tackles questions of sexuality and power, straddling classical mythology and modernist literature. She has added carnival spectacle to the mix, summoning images from roller derby, women’s rodeo and Mardi Gras, wandering on what some would regard as the margins of cultural legitimacy.
Davidson may be best known for her use of giant weather balloons for voluptuous sculptures simulating breasts, buttocks, and cleavage and often featuring fetishistic lingerie, tassels, and girdles. She acknowledges the association with women’s bodies. But she also insists that the work is genderless, and could reference men, children, animals or even hybrids of humans and animals. Davidson is still exploring this form, now with balloons fabricated to her specifications. Oyess, an eight-foot-tall pink balloon sculpture, is in the current show in front of a floor-to-ceiling window. The title is borrowed from Finnegan’s Wake, in which it is a liminal word, in the process of acquiring meaning. Unlike the sculpture itself, the word’s significance is not immediate or obvious. That disconnect destabilizes our comprehension of the world.
Towering above all else in the show is the eleven-foot-tall Eyeenvy, a science-fiction riff splicing a prison guard tower and a dilated pupil. All the other work in the show contemplates the body in pieces, but this piece countenances the face, which stares you down while denying any empathy. Walter Benjamin once observed that “what we used to call art begins at a distance of two meters from the body. But now, in kitsch, the world of things advances on the human being.” Glitzy and plastic, Eyeenvy advances on all it beholds. Its resists and scares, leaving you wandering and dissolute. Davidson, like a skilled carny, has harnessed the power of kitsch.
Nancy Davidson, “Braids Eggs and Legs: A Wandering,” Catskill Art Space, 48 Main Street, Livingston Manor, NY. Through November 25, 2023.
About the author: Fintan Boyle is an artist, curator, and occasional contributor to the art blog Romanov Grave.
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Fintan Boyle has captured Nancy Davidson’s work well, l9ve all the connections to literature and it makes sense. I’d like to add I also have seen a sense of her beginnings in Chicago. That funk has been embroiled with some interesting references. Go Nancy, love this work, wish I could see it.