by Alex Barton
In the series “BODY OF”, currently showing at the Warwick Museum of Art, I have placed the body in a new context. After the dismemberment and simplification of these bodies, we are left with iconography and a mass of flesh. I have used a variety of media to produce these large-scale freeform shapes, whose lifelike quality elaborates upon the grotesque nature of their character. This abstraction of our most familiar organic quality produces a tangible vehicle of anti-nature.
The left and right halves of these nebulous forms mock each other: the antagonism, therefore, creates a whole. I have personified the unnatural urges we exercise in our cultures and habits through this series of perversions to the body, representing true American sacrilege. This body of work challenges traditional natures and appropriations of the figure by concentrating on flesh as simply an abstract mass. The ambiguity of sexuality in these pieces demonstrates a freedom, an ungendered icon of nihilism.