ec · dy · sis (n). – the molting of the cuticle in many invertebrates of the clade Ecdysozoa. The cuticle of

these animals typically forms a largely inelastic exoskeleton, and is shed during growth. A new, larger

covering is formed thereafter.

Think about nakedness, the risk, putting one’s whole body on the line. A newfound emotional and physical

agency comes with the freedom from a protective shell. That agency combines simultaneously with the

anxiety and vulnerability of waiting for the new, stronger exoskeleton to form. In this exhibition, the objects act

as tethers to those painful thrilling moments, continuing to conduct the original energy, lambent like burning

filaments. They carry the lives of their makers, walking outward, an expulsion into more and more lives, more

situations, more rooms. Some bits of skin and hair and spit have made their way into the object, a typo in the

text, a glitch in the code, a discoloration of the film. A slip of the eye or lips or hand or tongue.

The vulnerable performance act of all creation, whether public or private, marks the beginning. Before the hot

lights, after everyone has gone home, after the brain has left the building. Moments strung together that push

at the edge of exertion, skin stripped bare, emotions laid out on a buffet table to be consumed by grubby

munchers, crass hands scooping from the lidless tureen body.

Gabriela Ruiz recovers objects to reclaim the expenditures of emotional labor and personal expression, their

decadent painting a new shell. The movement of hot liquids, of molten plastic, the peeling away of layers

provides Ilana Savdie the opportunity to probe desires under skin, the subterranean movement of material

driving subjects forward. Spencer Lewis takes the dramatic movement of paint and the stability of wooden

architecture to see himself as prop and propped within the art system.

Rafa Esparza considers the kinship formed through earth and the disruption of that earth through colonization,

using adobe and paint as primary means. Todd Gray photographs himself in numerous guises, obscuring and

amplifying his body under piles of shaving cream. Working on an opposite pole, Skip Arnold reveals his body

in its duration, angles, and curves. Pleasure, strength, and wear cohere into Skip as object, into his ultimate

reality as flesh material. For Aimee Goguen, abjection and animation are coterminous. To be animate is to be

abject; extension and excretion share the same bed.

At root in Anna Garner’s practice is contact between objects, weight and impact providing moments of

reflection. Her body occupies a paradigm of contained and elective risk, undertaking a spectacle of physical

discipline latent with failure. With rupture as his material, Ron Athey excavates humanity’s darkness and light

found in pain, sacrifice, and their recurring historical manifestations, the ongoing corpus of the world.