The Material Body @ MCA Denver (Senga Nengudi)
The very last thing I wrote in my notebook about this show was “SKIN!” and it's such an obvious connection I can’t believe that it took me so long to make it. Pantyhose is made to contain, hug, and mimic skin; here it’s pinned back, sliced open, splayed and stretched; loaded with sand and tension, filled with ideas about feminism, mass production, materials, the body, and pure form. The common made uncommon: the hose becomes golf clubs and club feet and bridges and butterflies in my mind. Frayed and tearing at the seams; the cutting and tension are violent — how have the pieces survived or changed over forty years?
Black and brown. Symmetry and triangles. Emphatically rough, raw, and handmade, but in a way that exploits the perfect lines and futuristic forms that arise naturally out of elasticity and tension; the forms feel slick and elegant — alien — in a way that is completely intrinsic to the materials. The pieces have been arranged rather than wrought or worked; simply brought forth from the hose, made taut.