Morph

Represented across diverse mediums, the body as subject constantly shifts to reflect the influence on artists’ perspectives on the human form. The artists selected for this show approach the body as raw material. They adapt it at will in order to explore identity, gender, religion, technology, disease, and the body’s role within the social matrix. The body is reduced to nothing more permanent than a modifiable facade, which can be constantly changed and morphed to resist or compliment outside forces. Morph investigates the body as a conduit for different artistic and theoretical strategies, which reveal the body’s fundamental role in comprehending our sense of self. In Dean Dempsey’s “Bound”, part of In the Dark series, he collapses historical and future narratives into stage photographs where the body is altered to exist in a liminal space. While collaborative duo, Sara Jimenez and Kaitlynn Redell encapsulate and perform “inbetweenness” as a space where identity is fluidly determined with other bodies and the environment through a video performance in Negotiating Bounds. Continuing her investigation of gender binaries through Kuwaiti garments in The Abaya Series, Dalal Ani offers new sculptural and photo performance documentation works that blend female and male garments into an indistinguishable creature that navigates public and private domains. In Mirror Stage, Kreerath Sunittramat represents a transgendered moment by employing street portrait artists in NY Times Square to draw his portrait while shirtless, donning a skirt and holding various items that suggest breasts as he endures the winter cold to transform him into a woman. Alicia DeBrincat explores and captures fleeting occurrences where bodies willfully deviate from the norm and seek out modes of interaction, unexpected and unauthorized appearances, while opening up a generative space of play, exploration, and resistance to societal mandates in her new painting series, Post-Medical Eden. In NRML, JIT Real exploits and defies aesthetic hedonism and pop culture as the trio gender bends their way through a concoction of music, visuals, construction, and performance, hypnotizing audiences to a chaotic trance. Jade Yumang generates his own accounts of queer folklore through his compulsive repetitive manipulation of materials to visualize queer form; in this case he presents a new sculpture, Backward! March!, where he dismantles a military jacket and impregnates it with an excess amount of fake flowers and erect seersucker appendages. In Lavar Munroe’s Of a Lesser People According to Tyler, he creates deities to conjure up and reclaim negative stereotypes of black culture through a Bahamian and American lens as he transforms detritus materials, such as cardboard, into beautiful mythological gods and goddesses that challenge racial and class discrimination. Fowler Arts Collective is a studio and gallery collective located in the Greenpoint Terminal warehouse complex located on the East River waterfront in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The gallery program at Fowler concentrates on exhibiting collaborative, self-directed shows between artists.