Nancy Davidson

Crystal Blue Persuasion

2002

Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio

“Davidson 's sculptures find their equivalent in the comic excess and eroticism of Mae West on the one hand and the masks, costumes, and puppet shows of medieval carnival on the other." -Nina Felshin, Figuring the Body, 1998

Nina Felshin, Figuring the Body, 1998

New York-based artist Nancy Davidson has continuously challenged the boundaries of minimalist and figurative sculpture. Her sculptures explore and challenge traditional assumptions about images of the female body and the implications of such attitudes with respect to contemporary art. For this exhibition, a nest of dressy weather balloons bask in a sea of blue light, as a hidden soundtrack beckons the viewer's attention with classic 1960s tunes like Crystal Blue Persuasion. In another gallery, inflated balloons press against the structure imposed by dozens of hinged Plexiglas facets that form gem-shaped containers.Having previously bound bulbous balloons in girdles and elaborate hand­ crocheted webs, her opting now to encase them in cut gems, provides a subversive send-up of man's constant striving to redesign nature and perfect its value.

Throughout the 1990s, Davidson produced flippant and sensuous sculptures that were immediately sassy, but also offered an implicit critique of society's obsession with model bodies that is both playful and thoughtful. Constructed from inflated weather balloons, enlarged 'heads" morph into fleshy bodies when they are cinched in tutus, garters, panties, braids or ruffles. Presented in myriad configurations, her balloon caricatures upend societal ideals and present cartoon conditions that people identify with, even as her sculptures flirt with the grotesque’s ability to transgress boundaries.

The visual equivalents of Francois Rabelais or Jonathan Swift's gargantuan literary characters, her chunks of 'blown-up reality" are both intimidating and humorous. Employing the sensual tactics of a carnival, bodily sensations of touch, smell, sound and sight are aroused when one experiences them, as if one were walking in a crowd during a carnival. She has photographed her sculptures at unusual angles, as if to freeze their odd features.

Instrumental in the history of feminist art, Davidson was included in UCLA's 1994 Bad Girls West exhibition, the Independent Curators Inc.'s traveling exhibition Empty Dress: Clothing as Surrogate in Contemporary Art, and Laughter Ten Years After, as well as exhibitions at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut; the Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In 1999, a major survey of her work from the 1990s was featured at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. She has also had solo exhibitions in Prague, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago.

Sue Spaid, Curator