Broken Babes, Together & Alone: Sarah Curry’s Common Threads at HEDGE
Silent and two-dimensional, paintings speak languages we have long forgotten—the dialects we once knew, the tongues of our childhood, the vernacular of our most recent loss. On view at HEDGE through October 26, Sarah Curry’s newest body of work, Common Threads, presents the amorphous space between then and now, what once was and what is today. The exhibition lays out kaleidoscopic color amidst painfully decapitated heads belonging to formerly poised, ceramic female figurines—some classically romantic and others, kitsch vestiges of 1950s Americana. These broken babes take their place alongside images of female celebrities and silhouettes of anonymous women shorn from mainstream magazines. In this presentation of Ms. Curry’s work, we see her venture incisively into largely uncharted territory: abstract grounds, printmaking, and work with other artists, including the venerable digital alchemist, Kasumi, and Ms. Curry’s former student at Brush High School, the enamellist and sculptor Emily Joyce.
In one of the exhibition’s openers, Part of the Story (2023), Sarah Curry pictures a surreal scene: a drawer of doll parts—arms and legs and busts and heads—and not one face smiles. Mute and fragmented, Ms. Curry’s eerie image takes its place within a longer history of artworks by female artists who use dolls as archetypes to confront assumptions about girl-culture and the objectification of the female body. (A little-known work by Cindy Sherman, for example, made while she was still a student at Buffalo State College in New York, Doll Clothes of 1975, is case in point, though entire books have been written about the subject.) [1] It is an age-old story—the girl and the doll—one never lacking in its quest to reshuffle ideas about identity, sex, gender, representation, and significantly, how things feel right now.
For Ms. Curry, Common Threads began when she caught glimpse of a ceramic Cinderella doll on Facebook Marketplace who cradled its broken-off ceramic head in the folds of her skirt. That the seller never mentioned this obvious and violent detail in the object’s description seemed incredible to Ms. Curry, illustrative of the disregard with which the female body can be treated. Her purchase of the figurine kicked off a small obsession. She began collecting these kinds of objects and experimenting with breaking off their heads (more on that below) and later, painting the forlorn figures in various states of disrepair. Lacing gold leaf around perforated edges, Ms. Curry references the Japanese custom of kintsugi, the art of repairing broken ceramics with gold dust mixed into lacquer, a metaphor for the beauty of mending and transforming brokenness.
An exceptionally focused and powerful force in Cleveland’s contemporary painting scene for more than a decade, Ms. Curry has long since sourced the complexity of what it means to be a woman, teenager, or child in her work—what it means to perform this role, to play it, act it, live it, love it, hate it, fear it, relish it, demolish or re-affirm the stereotypes that define it. In Common Threads, the politics of this present moment—so deeply personal for everyone, it seems—take shape subtly through paintings, video, precious objects, and the question of whether all women share some intangible if splintered stake together, always and across the years. As many artists have, Ms. Curry was reacting to and reflecting on the implications of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that ensured federal protection of reproductive autonomy for fifty years (1973-2022/3). [2] Moreover, the timespan during which this ruling held power mirrors the arc of Ms. Curry’s own life, and it became her adopted scaffold for the alternately violent and placid stories she tells in Common Threads. [3]
Part of Ms. Curry’s Is Was series, the modest-sized painting Call Waiting (2023)dials in what it means to communicate and talk across distance and time, cordlessly but also completely tied. In it, a young woman with sandstone colored skin and a dark bun atop her head stares pensively into the distance; she crades a red, land-line phone with a long, twirly cord. Her counterpart scales an unseen telephone pole while balancing precariously; a clunky blue old-school cell transmits her laughter, cueing memory that prior to the dawn of this digitally (dis)connected world, we lived without sleek tech gadgets.
Sourced from mainstream magazines published fifty years apart, Ms. Curry’s amalgamations often reverse expectations. In Call Waiting, the female figure hanging mid-air—engaged in what might qualify as prototypical “men’s work”—appeared in a magazine fifty years ago while the other protagonist, who speaks on the wall-mounted phone, showed up in recent print. Ms. Curry seems to position the figures like one person with two selves. Plucked from People, Time, and LIFE, throughout Common Threads Ms. Curry blurs, recontextualizes, and splices together seemingly disparate figures in the lush, lucid palette for which she is known. (A watershed moment arrived when the librarian at Brush High School, where Ms. Curry has taught art for more than twenty years, offered the artist access to piles of deaccessioned LIFE magazines.)
In her O-Liz series, Ms. Curry superimposes images of two female superstars—the hugely popular American rapper and singer Lizzo (born Melissa Viviane Jefferson in Detroit, MI in 1988) and the iconic, late British/American actress, Dame Elizabeth Taylor (1932 – 2011). Separated by nearly a generation, these two women share the “It-factor,” that irresistible, magnetic energy that ignites near religious adoration and fan-frenzy. An unsuspecting duo, Lizzo and Liz Taylor represent for Ms. Curry women adjoined across time. Both women are known for their activism and philanthropic causes, and of course, celebrity spotlight turmoil. With this series Ms. Curry amps up her experimentation with print media, connecting the dots and then dismantling them to create pixelated, seamless bricolages that sensitize how quickly time passes, how much things change, how much they stay the same, and how much we tend to ignore the time in-between. As Barbara Kruger told ARTnews in 2022, “The striking down of Roe should come as a surprise to no one. And if it does, they haven’t been paying attention.” [4]
In her Gravity series, women catapult through the air, freefall that reflects Ms. Curry’s observation that in the American advertisements of the past fifty years, women are often pictured afloat, unmoored, untethered, ungrounded. Here women run, leap, jump, kick-up their heals; they launch themselves in the air; they cheer and strut and throw themselves over the high wire. The women Ms. Curry pictures also often touch, but do they hold one another back or help one another along? This ambiguity—this variegated, uneven ground—divides and merges her figures in delicate, translucent ways. Ms. Curry paints with commanding presence and deep charisma—she confesses to being “angry” in the moment, literally throwing around paint—merging toneand form and line to create the deft, radiant facture of her surfaces. And yet an unspoken anxiety winds its way through the exhibition: how much or how little has changed for women in the past fifty years?
In a video that doubles as a sound piece, Decapitatin’ Rhythm (2024), Kasumi offers a tense and troubling answer. In it, viewers witness the actual decapitating of the female figurines Ms. Curry painted, a task undertaken by Ms. Curry’s partner, the painter David King (though only his gloved hands appear on screen). Sleek and seamless, raw and rhythmic, the looping video is painful, addictive, and cathartic to watch, cresting in an unexpected moment where the figures, once falling apart, now swoop back together. Momentarily whole again, they defy their assailant’s intention to break them apart, demolish them. In the midst of this sequence, we hear Ms. Curry gasp, shocked by the act’s brutality.
For Kasumi, it was a first to work with an artist in such a specific way. The times seem to demand this kind of togetherness though and when Ms. Curry turned over the raw footage of these decapitations, Kasumi set to work creating a meditative and musical circuit with imagery as menacing as it is mesmerizing. Illustrative of being torn down ritualistically and then put back together again, it feels and sounds like the train wreck from which we cannot peel away our eyes; I watch it again, and again, and again.
In Kasumi’s hands, the smashing of these dolls’ heads takes on new meaning, perhaps erasing Ms. Curry’s original intentions all together, generating instead a ceremonial kind of obliteration, stripping the figures of their symbolic stature. (Think, for example, of Ai Weiwei shattering a Han Dynasty urn in 1995, or closer here at home in Cleveland, the choreographed smashing of a Baroque figurine at the end of the ballet Feast in 2022, visual artist Corrie Slawson’s collaboration with dancers Christina Lindhout and Kelly Korfhage.) Further extending the ephemera so key to this exhibition’s disposition, Emily Joyce’s reconstitution of the actual broken pieces of these dolls strikes up a totally different tune. Precious and paralyzed, the broken remains of the figures Ms. Curry turned over to her former student, now an accomplished artist in her own right, read like broken toy store dolls on display, voiceless and shattered but still treasurable, prized just for being, even as they are in pieces.
In her artist statement, Sarah Curry writes that this new body of work addresses the silencing of women and creates space for women to converse with one another across time. Whether or not the work speaks to this exactly remains up for grabs, but for a long time now, Sarah Curry has been at the helm of a major figurative painting movement in Cleveland. As critic Wendy Vogel described in an issue of Art Basel in May of 2021, there is no doubt figurative painting has been hot on the market, percolating during the aughts but on fire since the mid- to late 2010s. This resurgence does not, according to Vogel, reprise the 1980s male-dominated Neo-Expressionist movement; instead, it is women, so often the subjects in figurative painting, who continue to lead its charge as authors in this endeavor. [5] The Cleveland painting scene is not far behind it seems, sumptuous and saturated as it is at the moment by such painters as Ms. Curry, Katie Richards, or the long unseen and sorely missed Rose Haserodt (whose work is now on view at Brett Shaheen through November 7th). Stina Aleah (at moCa Cleveland in partnership with the Museum of Creative Human Art in 2021), Judy Takács, and the late Shirley Alley Campbell among others, magnify this panoramic scene. This urge to paint bodies heightened acutely during and after the lonely years of the pandemic, when we craved the company of others so decisively, envying that bodily feeling of being beside someone else.
For some time now, Ms. Curry has composed deeply original work made up of the faces and bodies she knows best—friends, children of friends, or her students at Brush high school. Common Threads eludes such a route in exchange of channeling a more universal voice that also happens to feel personal, timely, and urgent. The concept of feminism straddles a hugely fractured field today and though Ms. Curry never addresses feminism outright in this body of work, she works at its very center, agitating its bends and breaks and convergences in meaningful ways. Cinderella stories, she seems to say, do not exist; there is no perfect golden shoe. Women harbor many different selves. These are the multitudes of which Whitman wrote—indeed, a largeness ever more relevant in our metamodern world. [6] And we must, as Ms. Curry suggests, cherish every one of these past and present incarnations.
EVENTS:
Third Friday reception 6-8 Friday, October 18 at HEDGE Gallery.
Sarah Curry, Kasumi, and Emily Joyce will hold an artist talk at HEDGE on Tuesday, October 22nd, 5:30pm – 7:30pm.
Endnotes
[1] See for example, Grace Banks, Play with Me: Dolls – Women – Art (Laurence King Publishing) 2017.
[2] See comments by the legendary Guerilla Girls and the formidable feminist, Barbara Kruger, as quoted in Angelica Villa’s article, “Legendary Artists Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Nan Goldin Respond to Roe Draft Opinion, ‘A Surprise to Noone,” ARTnews,May 4, 2022. See https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/barbara-kruger-jenny-holzer-nan-goldin-artists-respond-to-roe-supreme-court-draft-opinion-1234627508/, accessed online, Tuesday, October 8, 2024.
[3] First argued December 13, 1971, reargued October 11, 1972, and decided on January 22, 1973, the entire syllabus of Roe v. Wade is available online through the Library Congress, https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep410/usrep410113/usrep410113.pdf; see also the Supreme Court’s syllabus for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the June 23, 2023 ruling that overturned precedent set by Roe v. Wade, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf. Both accessed online, Tuesday, October 8, 2024. The landmark Roe v. Wade’s ruling was predicated on a citizen’s right to privacy, considered as the guarantee of liberty in the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Wendy Vogel, “On the rise of figurative female painters – and the gallerist championing them.” Art Basel, May 22, 2021, https://www.artbasel.com/stories/figurative-painters-christina-quarles-sofia-mitsola-pilar-corrias?lang=en. Accessed online, Wednesday, October 8, 2024.
[6] Though the reception of Walt Whitman’s poem, Song of Myself (1855) was anything but warm at the time of its first publication, the 52-section poem (nearly 1300 lines) is iconic today and has, in recent years, become emblematic of a rallying cry to express a splintered human self in today’s post-2020 digital world: “I am multitudes!” Multitudes (pun intended) of online memes exist in reference to this classic American poem. See, for example, a short quip about this exactly on the Penguin/Random House website, “How ‘I contain multitudes’ became a cry for the perennially online,” September 17, 2020, https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/09/walt-whitman-leaves-of-grass-i-contain-multitudes-twitter-meme. To read the poem in its entirety, check out the Poetry Foundation online: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version. Both accessed online, Wednesday, October 16, 2024.
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