to ignite our skin

Opening Reception
Wed, Sep 17, 2025 6-8pm

to ignite our skin features newly commissioned and recent works from an international group of artists whose contributions, spanning sculpture, installation, photography, and architectural intervention, explore shedding as a condition of the contemporary body, locating it as a contested ground for transition, becoming, regeneration, and refusal.

The works featured are texturally layered and pieced together from a hybrid of materials weathered by or forged through the body: worn clothes, scavenged organic matter, tattered construction materials, remnants of military wares, sheared and shaped steel, carved animal hides, and AI-generated ghostly doubles. Their scale shifts dynamically—from the monumental to the unobtrusive—in dialogic play and camouflage with the raw textures of the brick, steel, and concrete of the building’s industrial architecture. The sculptures animate the space, rising to touch the high edges of the ceiling beams, sprawling from their core base, and burrowing into the scars of the walls. Stratified images coat the windows and offer collapsed views of the city, while the floor is enlivened by an installation of perforated paper that will be gradually altered by visitor flow.

Like a snake undergoing ecdysis, the artworks embrace the image of replacing one’s own skin, at times an opulent and decaying act, erotic and violent, and full of potential and contradiction. They simultaneously embody the tension between a desire to evade capture and a more sinister, Sisyphean demand for perpetual reinvention and present a contrast to recent explorations of metamorphosis that idealize self-figuration. Through a sensuous ferocity, the artists ignite unyielding configurations of forms that unravel, decay, morph, and reconstitute themselves into boundless iterations.

Participating artists include Patricia Ayres, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Sarah Friend, Mire Lee, Umico Niwa, Mimi Park, Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos, Sofía Sinibaldi, Erik Tlaseca, and Yu Ji.

to ignite our skin is curated by Jovanna Venegas, Curator.