Nicki Cherry
I can be a woman for you

Opening Saturday, March 9
2-5pm

Slow Dance is very proud to present “I can be a woman for you,” a solo exhibition of new sculptures by Nicki Cherry. The exhibition opens March 9 and runs through April 21st.

Nicki Cherry: I think we humans often comfort ourselves with the misconception that we are capable of exercising total control over our physical and psychological states. The body and mind are messy, slippery things. Perhaps this is why anxiety and desire feel the same to me—they are both dramatic total losses of control over our mental state, so strongly felt that they manifest as physical illness.  

Each of the fragments in this show were made by coating a segmented portion of my body in plaster bandages. They are a record of self-touch and are limited to portions of my body that I am able to reach. 

What is missing are the parts of myself which can only be formed in relation to others.

Although the plaster fragments on view in Cherry’s exhibition are the result of certain limitations, described by the artist as the limits of physical reach, these barriers also enact pointed and clear moments of isolated presence. A shoulder, a lower leg and foot, an elbow…segments of the body brought into sharper focus, even when estranged from the whole. They have been touched and recorded, lingered on and mapped. These are places in the body where emotions nestle in deeply, out of sight and beyond immediate recognition. There is knowledge cradled in these places, too. In the lower back and collarbone. In the feet and hands. Cherry’s fragments are molded from their own body, yet through the segments’ particularities, they transcend biography, as though adopting a new sense of agency and individuality. We might identify with them, as viewers—relating shoulder to shoulder, arm mirroring arm—but there is something unknowable here, too. Beyond sight, like those spaces carved out within us where feelings hide. 

The surfaces of these quasi-exoskeletons are punctuated with the small, shining protrusions of pearls. Their presence is subtle, as though produced from below the surface of the material, not unlike a blemish or a cyst. While most pearls are formed within the tissue of a mollusk, the variety of pearl Cherry incorporates are blisters, formed on the shell’s inner surface, caused by a foreign object finding its way into the space between the mollusk’s tissue and shell. They are, in a sense, unwanted growths; something unfamiliar expelled by the body. 

I’m interested in pearls as objects we cherish as pure symbols of femininity, despite being an excretion formed out of irritation not dissimilar from kidney stones. Irritation can create something beautiful. When I have been shucked open by emotional epiphany, I have relished in connecting with others  over  shared vulnerability. Does cracking open a leaking shell —or a body, or a mind—dissolve the boundary between interior and exterior? The insides of these plaster shells retain some clues that they were pressed against my skin—on many you can see the texture of my goosebumps.

These plaster shells appear weathered, their patinas reminiscent of mold or lichen. At moments, we see the slumps in flesh, the wrinkles and goosebumps of skin. In this way, we’re reminded of the material reality of these bodies we carry around with us. We’re unable to escape them. But as they intertwine with the metal supports that Cherry incorporates, they are given a seeming weightlessness, poised as though alighting into the air. At other moments—a dangling foot, a portion of chest creased by the weight of a breast—the shells appear heavy, pulled by gravity. Their need for support is more apparent here. 

The grab bars consider the dissolving boundary between our bodies and our built environment. Assistive architecture acts as an extension of ourselves, pointing towards our bodies’ vulnerability and reliance on outside systems of support. Grab bars and bedpans are objects meant to be used in private moments, but have a quality of the public to them. The grab bars in this work are installed to form a skeleton—specifically a rib cage—that transforms the gallery into the interior of a chest.

Weightlessness, collapse, awkwardness, bliss. We know these feelings, don’t we, even if we each know them differently? The sensation of feeling heavy in our bodies, bogged down by worry or fear or grief. By love unreturned. But there are moments of ecstasy and escape, too. We run, we swim, we ride in a car with the windows down. We get high, we have sex. We lay in the grass or float in water. Sometimes, we forget our bodies are anything at all: a peculiar kind of luxury. They always catch up with us.

As Cherry’s work suggests, the body insists on its presence, but it doesn’t do so alone.  

Artist’s Bio: Nicki Cherry is an artist based in New York and Chicago. After initially studying to become a particle physicist, Cherry received their BA from the University of Chicago in 2014 and their MFA from Yale School of Art in 2019. Cherry’s work has been presented nationally at venues including NARS Foundation, the Border Gallery, GHOSTMACHINE, Flux Factory, and Shin Gallery in New York; AUTOMAT and Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia; and the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts in Chicago. Their work has been written about in the Brooklyn Rail, the Washington Post, Hyperallergic, and ArteFuse. They have received grants from Café Royal Cultural Foundation, the Queens Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. They have completed residencies at Surf Point Foundation in Maine, Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, the Bronx Museum of Arts, and NARS Foundation in Brooklyn.