Alison Kudlow
Defensive Strategies for Tender Objects
May 17 - June 22

Alison Kudlow made the work in her new show Defensive Strategies for Tender Objects while pregnant with her second child; her due date closely aligned with the show's opening. It was a confluence that had a big impact on the work even though—in actuality—her son was born on March 27 quite suddenly, within an hour of her logging contractions. Though this date too was after all of the sculptures for this exhibition had been completed. 

This opener is not meant to position Alison’s work in a maternal narrative, or even to suggest a reparative register, but to notice that these sculptures she made during this pregnancy take up positions that elide easy categorization; exhibit contour rivalry, allude to states of becoming, and conjure the more porous, changing, and fluid conditions of human be-ing. The artist herself says that she is evoking the “surreal plasticity” experienced when the “body’s shape and functionality transformed” not only during pregnancy but also through previous experiences with “illness, surgery, birth, and lactation.” The theme of the show then is less one of motherhood (the reparative)—of the mother’s defense of the child—than one about the complex negotiations with the body in flux—a mind of its own, full of surprises. It is shot through with the contradictions of alienated embodiment, and even when you can most feel the tenderness of the show’s title there is an uncanny distance from the comforts of the known-known. 

This sense is in part material. The sculptures themselves are somehow simultaneously doughy and bony. They are made of ceramic and glass, and occasionally bronze, and mostly hang on the wall. They ooze and pucker and open. They are beings and body parts in turns. They are plantlike, carnivorous, and geological. They have gothic names; Maw, Breach, Thoracic Surge, Suture. They are quiet and they are achingly loud.

But these roadblocks to intimacy are also conceptual, and this work is a continuation of a larger project in Kudlow’s sculpture. In this oeuvre the space between what is known in a thing and what is suggested, abstracted, sublimated—left out, or up to the imagination is brought forward. This kind of thing has a long history in art but also taps into our most basic relationship to objects. Misrecognition is a key element in folding the new into our thought and in reinvesting potential in the known. It is a powerful engine of synthesis, a both / and machine. 

Deanna Evans Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Alison Kudlow, which will be her first with the gallery.

Exhibition text by Lucas Blalock.

Press:
ARTFORUM
Yale University Radio Interview
BOMB Magazine