Complex tension: Artist Chris Curreri delivers attraction, rejection, vulnerability, and power with this new exhibit at Contemporary Calgary

Chris Curreri’s new exhibit at Contemporary Calgary features a worried figure who seems to be sulking in the corner. Named Christopher, he is a self-portrait artist and a life-sized hand puppet standing with his head bowed against the wall.

When asked why Christopher turned his back on the viewer, Curreri seemed reluctant at first to answer.

“I think he’s being punished a little bit,” said the Toronto -based artist. “But don’t talk to me too much about that.”

In fact, Curreri seems generally reluctant to discuss the sexual characteristics of That, There, It, a multidisciplinary exhibit that blends photography and figural sculpture and covers more than a decade of the artist’s work. Some of the pieces are meant to represent a “way of talking about power and weakness.”

The first piece a visitor to Contemporary Calgary’s Ring Gallery is likely to encounter is The Thing, a collaboration with Curreri’s partner and fellow artist Luis Jacob. The silicone sculpture is based on a picture created by two people with his hands and knees. In the life-sized sculpture, each body part of the figure is hermetically sealed under skin-tight black covering that looks like BDSM fetish gear. The large-scale installation, Self Portrait with Luis Jacob, was just completed this year and features two life-sized figures housed in a mirrored cube lit from the inside. It is based on a 1973 photograph by Toronto artist Rodney Werden titled Self-Portrait with Jorge Zontal. Both Werden and Zontal were fixtures in Toronto’s underground art scene in the 1970s. The photo featured the photographer sitting in a chair and Zontal covering his eyes as he stood behind him next to a vintage camera. Curreri again used himself and Jacob as models for the piece, with him playing the role of Werden. Bloom, the photograph used as the main visual in the sale of That, There, Is, depicts the face of a man (Curreri again, presumably) being covered or perhaps consumed by an explosion of chewing-gum bubbles.

“The porousness of bodies as metaphor (is) a theme that runs through all work and so is the absence of porousness: What does it mean to encounter a body that you can’t see or you can’t touch or that doesn’t even speak? he asked.

“I think all the pieces are related in some way,” he added. “For me, most of the work has to do with using this idea of ​​bodily porousness as a means of communicating or pointing out the ways we relate to each other. It includes states of power and weakness.For example, I made a puppet of myself.It is the idea that you show yourself to the world, you make yourself to the world, by speaking.But also the world affects you when you are here.The idea of the hand puppet waiting to be animated speaks about that.Alternatively, (Bloom), the image used for the show, shows another state in which an object from inside the body is captured by bubble gum. The bubble enters outside the body space. ”

Curreri studied art and photography at Ryerson University and the Ontario College of Art and Design before receiving his Master of Fine Arts in photography from Bard College in New York. In 2015, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, which is Canada’s pre-eminent prize for emerging artists. He has participated in several international group exhibitions and produced solo exhibitions across Canada, including Thick Skull, Thin Skin last year at the Esker Foundation of Calgary.

Regardless of the thematic threads, it’s safe to say that one of the hallmarks of Curreri’s work is its provocative nature. Her Kiss Portfolio, for example, is a series of close-up photos of two men kissing. However, this is not obvious by looking at them and, as the attached text suggests, “viewers are tempted” to see closer poses and body parts than are actually shown. In another series of photos named August 17, 2021 are closeups of an old bicycle rolled up or gently consumed by a tree.

“I took it at night with a flash,” Curreri said. “I like that kind of forensic feel here. I think what the flash does is give it a kind of freezing of the incomprehensible, or an absorption.

Perhaps the most captivating pieces in the exhibit are titled Insomniac, which are color photographs featuring the entrails of animals perched on mundane objects or artistic hanging.

They seem to have safely entered the same realm of David Cronenberg-esque body-horror movies and acquired-taste territory, but Curreri insists there is beauty in them as well.

“The palette is great,” he said. “They almost look like crystal. But I think there’s this kind of tension where people are attracted to the palette or the form and there’s something complicated about objecting to this death. There’s a kind of attraction, rejection. ”

Chris Curreri: That, There, It runs until Sept. 18 at Contemporary Calgary.

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