Doesn’t Hold Water
press release
Underdonk is pleased to announce Erika Keck and Elizabeth Insogna’s upcoming two-person exhibition Doesn’t Hold Water, curated by Erik Dalzen.
Erika and Elizabeth’s work, on paper and ceramics respectively, offer a multitude of interpretations between human, plant, and animal forms. The two artists use a vessel as a symbolic jumping off point to probe the metaphysical, simultaneity, and notions of the body. Erika will present selections from an ongoing series of drawings featuring vessels and floral portraits. Elizabeth’s contributions include three biomorphic, coil built sculptures incised with carvings, layered with glaze, and an interference overlay.
For the past ten months Erika produced daily drawings. The practice approaches ritual as a process of purge or release. Emerging from this exercise are two prominent themes, firstly, works comprised of floral elements mirrored vertically across the page. Each resulting work produces a sort of rudimentary portrait of a humanoid character, a chameleon that oscillates between corporality and floral ornamentation. The other recurring motif is alien-like vessels that feel familiar in form but never settle into a functional pot or conventionally used object. Both series of drawings contain hypnotic repetition of lines, color and tonal gradients, and anthropomorphic appendages.
Elizabeth’s glazed stoneware sculptures, reminiscent of bodily forms and animals, are similarly riddled with approximations. In Labyrinth-Serpent-Strange Armor-Shapeshifting-Bird a torso-like form rests atop rudimentary legs. The bulbous construction seems to jut out past its center of gravity, surely to topple, yet the precarious pose it stands firm. The piece’s undulating surfaces are incised with cryptic markings and glyphs and the surface textures range from matte to metallic or phosphorescent gloss. Although traditionally constructed but clearly non functional, the piece exists as both form and void, witnessed through its mass and surfaces as well as the voids, holes, and perforations within the shell. As the title of the piece indicates, the work is rife with referents across a range of creatures as well as inhabiting the meditative space of a maze.
Via the vessel–a familiar and banal form relating to our bodies, and many aspects of our consumptive driven lives–Elizabeth and Erika find a vehicle to explode binaries, interrogate convention, and invite an expansive read. Rather than straddling a divide their work advances multiplicity–animalistic and figurative, vernacular and spiritual, masculine and feminine. Their work is at once one and the other. By approximating the formal qualities of a vessel but side-stepping the traditional functions, Erika’s drawings and Elizabeth’s sculptures are firmly familiar while insisting on something more inclusive and expansive.
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Elizabeth Insogna’s work: ceramic sculptures, vessels and installations center within the symbolic and metaphysical as related to the divine feminine and ancient magic. Past solo exhibitions include Tracing the Spirit at RAR gallery in Berlin and Psyche’s Reason in NYC. She has participated in group exhibitions at The Abrons Art Center, The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, and The National Arts Club. Her work has been featured in Artsy, Magic Praxis, Huffington Post, Abraxas Journal, and Hyperallergic.
Erika Keck (1977, Albuquerque, NM) is a sculptor and painter living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She studied at the University of New Mexico. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and cultural institutions in the United States and internationally.
April 2nd – May 8th
Opening reception, April 2nd, 6-8 pm
Underdonk
1329 Willoughby Ave #211
Brooklyn, NY 11237
L train to Jefferson St
Hours: Open Saturdays and Sundays 1-6 PM
