NO FATE
September 17th - October 30th
Swivel Saugerties
Swivel Saugerties is pleased to present Angela Conant’s first exhibition with the gallery, NO FATE, featuring works which seamlessly interchange and cross mediums of sculpture, painting, drawing, and installation, circling around the artist’s signature material of stone. Conant’s approach at once pays tribute to the centuries-old artistic lineage of this material, while she also uses it to contradict history and quite literally shape a new one as the works question cultural relationships with the body, beauty, and gender norms.
The notion of the internal body is only an idea; an image that resides in the mind's eye. Here, Conant takes the concept of figurative painting and reorients our point of view inside the space of the body, looking out. The results pointedly respond to how the world at large, politics, and history shape the narrative of what we believe is true and possible when considering the body. Conant’s work confronts the paternalistic urge to protect these vessels, rather than approaching them with humility, curiosity and imagination.
This gesture is signified even in the exhibition's title, which derives from James Cameron’s infamous “Terminator” franchise, where the character Sarah Connor carves the words “NO FATE” into a picnic table. The films highlighted Cameron’s interest in a lead female character that confronts traditional patriarchal power structures (as much as possible within the blockbuster genre.) Referencing this sentiment is the floor sculpture, Reminder (You Don't Deserve to Suffer), where four puddles of serpentinite are engraved with the titular statement, a sentiment that crystallized for the artists in the midst of recent world events where leaders have used human safety, health and happiness as leverage for power. Over this period, the artist's individual experience has included loss, family illness, as well as the birth of her first child via emergency cesarean in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown . These experiences solidified Conant’s motivation to work around the fluid and unknowable qualities of the human body, fueled by her awareness that birth and death are the two most momentous honors that are humanly possible to witness.
Conant’s amorphous style is one that is not quite figurative, but likewise not abstract. The works employ strange anatomical forms that weave in, out, and around hand-carved marble elements that rest in an everlasting space of pitch black, as in the work Future Outcast. Conant's impeccable combination of formal study and perversion of the human form is especially evident in her piece Kewpie Dolls and Urine Stalls. Taking the name from the prophetic 1986 song Androgynous by the post-punk band The Replacements, this piece incorporates a stone element which she imagined as a non-binary sex organ.
Through her work, the artist gives us social commentary in a reflective sense. Using her call and response working method, she demonstrates a wish for an intricate and simultaneously simplified form. Her oeuvre seems to suggest that we humans are only made up of time and space, and are at once very important and very small in this cosmic universe. Like her stone objects, we are made of dust, and will only return to dust.
Photos by Cary Whittier
