The discreetly gestural sculptures and wall-hangings of Catherine Czacki and April Street evoke ideas of skin and duration. Their slumping, sagging postures are ambivalent to the obscure processes of their creation. The result is a disquieting intimacy suggestive of proximity to a live body. In the work it is clear that a thing is never just an object, but a fetish or fossil in which private performance has petrified.
April Street’s sensuous paintings are similarly rooted in experience, the type situated between kinesthetic memory and action. In a private performance, she wraps herself in hosiery fabric, lies atop paint-pooled canvases reenacting a recorded series of positions from her sleep. The initial impressions made on the canvases are then rinsed away, repainted, then hidden underneath or replaced by hosiery. Some of the works are treated in gold leaf, bronzed, spun into ropes, or accented by twisting bondage restraints. The result is fleshy and troublesome, compounded by such titles as I’ll keep you close like fingers around a fragile neck (collar).
