NOW SHOWING

CLOSING RECEPTION - THURSDAY, MARCH 19 AT 6:30PM TO 8:00PM

February 18 - March 19

Opening reception February 19 6:30pm to 8:00pm

Through diverse media Body explores the human form as a powerful locus for identity, memory, transformation, and resistance. 

Featuring 8 Iowa artists (Stephanie Brunia, Genevra Daley, Kelly Devitt, Brittany Brooke Crow, Ingrid Lilligren, Cynthia O’Hern, Matty Palamara, and Catherine Reinhart) the exhibition will present the body as both deeply intimate and inherently public.

The exhibition is curated by Kelly Devitt in conjunction with the 2025/2026 Iowa Artist fellowship, supported by the Iowa Arts Council and the Iowa Economic Development Authority.

Prepositional | Propositional

by Michaela Mullin

For me, sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture.

–Louise Bourgeois

Vulnerability and memory manifest in many ways. They transform into and connect to new things at unexpected junctures. This takes place with and within the bodily form, for the body is a container that holds, leaks, and manipulates the amorphous into something we can see and touch–which can surround. The exhibition, Body, curated by Kelly Devitt, manages to effect that beautifully, as a show of quiet disruption. And the artists Devitt chose all seem to understand that we, as humans, are constantly morphing into our selves–folding in and reaching out as an endless choreography on the stages of our world–private, public, internal, external and liminal. 

Devitt’s ceramic pieces, as well as art from seven other Iowa-based artists working in various media, comprise Body. Devitt says the exhibition is “a visual dialogue between soft and hard forms—[where] fibrous sculptures and two-dimensional textile works contrast with the rigidity of ceramics. [And] photography further expands this conversation [...]” What a generous and generative conversation this is. Each artist exhibiting here is thinking about and making based on identity and navigation–the two widest yet enveloping paths: who are we and where are we [going]? And the knowledge that those queries are augmented at any given minute by the dynamic elements of encounter and relation. 

Devitt’s practice has evolved from work of, on, and in the flesh of her own body to ceramic and silicone sculptures, with a range of glazes and colors. Five newer works are on display, with titles such as, “Two Faced” and “You Make My Skin Crawl.” The titles are distrusting, resistant; and the artworks, in their asymmetry, stages of infection-red, swelled forms, and sutures, acknowledge the fact that “bodies age and decay … heal, strengthen, and mend.” The former work evokes a playfulness of a standing object/body–that is, standing on three legs. While the head/face is not detailed or primary, the glossy burned-pink finish gives the ‘body’ that these feet hold up, the look of dense but soft-serve ice cream–a balance and flavor sure to fail, eventually. The latter, her most recent sculpture, is an investigation of “the translation of emotions between bodies, specifically the maternal act of self-regulation to soothe a child.” This works evokes a solidity despite the small eruptions that dot its surface like sores. And the pale-flesh-toned base is sized for foundational matters, a carer at the bottom, to give upwards and out.

Devitt studied at Iowa State with, and worked for, ceramicist Ingrid Lilligren, whom Devitt considers a mentor. Displayed in Body are four of Lilligren’s gourd-shaped, ceramic vessels with braille, from her series, Pandora’s Pockets. These are titled/named: “Kelly,” “Joan,” “Jeanine,” and “MA.”The work is playing on and with the way “culture regards women as mysterious [...] giving rise to myths and efforts to keep us in check.” Lilligren considers a literal “pocket” at the fore of each sculpture, which invites a limited interactivity, to be “just a bit transgressive.” Inside these, are cards with a sentence given by each work’s namesake about their particular experience of  “being a woman.”

Because being is ongoing, continuous. And contortive. The installation piece of soft sculptures, “Entryway,” by Fairfield-based clay and textile artist Genevra Daley, takes this performative twisting and materializes it. The elements are placed in two spots of the gallery, extending the idea and imagining the real extension that clothes and shoes offer our bodies. On raw wood coat hooks, in a basic Quaker style, hang sartorial sculpturals, tweed wool jackets in greens and browns, and pants, all knotted up, cut open and disemboweled, so to speak. In the manner of Louise Bourgeois’ rubber body suit/sculpture, Avenza (1975), these softer, warmer, perhaps less wearable, cloth barnacles and appendages are culled from the fabric that makes up the more tailored parts of each piece. Daley said, “I have punched, squeezed, torn, and coaxed materials again and again until my body understood them, until patterns emerged that meant something, until the work mirrored my relationship to my body [...]” (maakemagazine.com).

Des Moines-based felt artist, Cynthia O’Hern, must also punch and squeeze, wet and pound, heat and comb, and agitate wool to the point of elation. Or so that is what her large-scale wall works feel like they must have as processual back story. These figurative works float on the boundaries of sublimity, just like our bodies. Regardless of the pose, be it Yogic, as in “Sreabhadh Ionam (Flow Within Me),” or a landscape of draped triple bodies, in “Study in Body/Landscape Formation/Alteration à la Cailleach #1,” there is a dual seeking/resting happening. Inspired by O’Hern’s time in Ireland, she honors the feminine through Celtic stories and archetypes.

At the long back wall of the exhibition space, Devitt sited O’Hern’s massive, 117” H x 45” W, feltwork, “Limbs of Time.” The use of colored wool to create an almost translucent ‘skin’ is startling for the sanguine hue it allows the viewer to witness. The work has been hung to fit the wall, and in doing so has been turned, hands to 10 o’clock, feet to 4 o’clock. It is an embrace that greets one far and near as they walk the gallery.

And to the entryway of the exhibition, one finds the work (my) embodied [text] by Ames-based textile artist, Catherine Reinhart. This iteration of work she has made with cuttings of her own hair, woven with red silk thread, is a textural and textual site-specific work, tracing and rendering the ‘body’ of the verse, Psalm 22. Each pin marks a word, and the hair enjambs each line, curving down for the next of the stanza, culminating in a pile of line on a plexi box. The cumulative locks are influenced by experience of grief and loss due to cancer. The red throughline with the hair is also a remembrance of the chemo line during her mother’s illness. 

The other line that weaves through Reinhart’s work is the matrilineal line, such as in the piece, Relic, a disassembled baby carrier mended in silk with jeweled buckles. The sage pieces of fabric are themselves components of the larger assembled structure as well as appearing as pattern pieces to replicate and put together something else from this model. The configuration of the separated parts also seem to depict a childlike depiction of flying, something the child would end up doing, unsafely, had the carrier come undone without an artist’s attention and intention–it is quite stunning in its simplicity, in its looking like the very thing it might cause. 

The metaphorical flight, fall, tear, and repair. All of this and more happens to, through, inside and around our bodies, as it does in the exhibition. The more direct representation of humans in skin and bones comes via photography. Brittany Brooke Crow for instance, with lens and hand, shows the viewer what it looks like to feel like. Take, “Untitled Self Portrait (cut into four pieces),” a photograph taken of herself, hair hanging, reflected in a mirror beneath her, so her doubling is then doubled again for the final cut work, where the subtractive becomes additive. Multiplicity and repetition are performative elements that assist as Crow  “uses image-making to confront her fear of vulnerability while exploring intimacy.”

With “Self Portrait Body Folds,” Crow bends her body so that flesh rolls and tucks, and becomes pinchable and pinched, creating a black and white topography of folds in strips of image. The crevices that create the shadowed moments of the composition remind the viewer that what’s invisible is still vital to the visibility of self. In other collaged photos, Crow literally tears the photographic print into a recombinatory narrative of how we see and are seen, exploring “the tangle of historical tropes, cultural expectations, and personal control that comes with representing the queer female body.”

Matty Palamara, Ames-based artist, also explores queer bodies in the series, Be Good or Be Good at It, with a focus of “coming of age in the social media boom of the 2010s.” As a queer and trans artist, interdisciplinary practice within the digital format of photography becomes a hypervisual source of aggregated and aggravated communications. Palamara says that “being a child of the internet, I feel that my body and the idea of who I am has been downloaded, morphed, and shared in ways that I am still trying to understand.” 

In vivid neon colors, Palamara’s work feels a little like that of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist’s single-channel video in pink and green as screenshot. But Palamara, by generational definition, is more contemporary. Their online images get shared/collaged together in a compositional space, mediated by world-wide-webbing, filled with popular culture references, such as images of Lorde and Miley Cyrus, captions instead of chyrons, and themselves, often up front and central to the visual noise that attempts to explicate and decode. Palamara’s titles are tell-tales also, such as  “Chronically Online,” “They’re all Watching You,” and “Looking Around Inside, Come on In.” It’s a hesitant invitation, but an invitation, nonetheless.

A reluctance to represent others is something Iowa City-based photographer, Stephanie Brunia, is concerned with; more that the invitation to ‘come on in’ isn’t necessarily always extended to art photographers. Photographs in this exhibition come from different periods of her career. The self-portrait, “Torsos 3,” is striking in its muscular configuration. Due to the turning of Brunia’s head, the clavicle and its covering skin make an exaggerated bodyscape near the neck and shoulder blade. The hollows where no bone exists opens the eye to all the ‘negative’ space we also hold and must equally protect.

In Brunia’s  “Attempt 5816,” the self portrait of an arm being ruched like fabric by an other’s hand is at the core of what it means to be exposed. A soft spot, but not a sensitive one, per se. The elbow, today, unlike in Victorian times, is not threat nor risk. But a reminder that we, in our vulnerabilities and memories and flesh, are malleable and resilient only up to a point. The body, like anything we empirically know, has thresholds we must honor, love, and protect.

Devitt’s curatorial gift to us all, with Body, is that she understands the physical and existential complexities we harbor and deploy, and has maintained a thread through all her choices, based on how her “own work focuses on skin as a protector of body and being, as well as an entity that often betways or communicates without permission.”