From January 30 through March 6, I-20 will present the first comprehensive solo exhibition for New York artist Nina Levy. Spare Parts is a series of nine self-portraits in which the artist’s body is overlaid with sculptural replacements. The series is paired with a room-size sculptural installation, Couple.
The body parts in the photographs are sculpted and cast in resin with automative paint, cast iron, plaster with oil paint, and urethane foam. Among the cibachrome photographs are an oversize head grinning aggressively for the camera atop a normal-size body, a diminutive body with a natural-size head, and a cast-iron back. The sculpted parts can be read as a metaphorical stand-in for a natural body part, or can be seen as a larger – or smaller-than-life addition. The proportions may be whimsical or slightly unsettling. One’s head, torso and limbs are not always in perfect alignment; they may vary. Levy’s parts are modeled, but not hyperreal, and bear the signs of their fabrication.
The installation Couple operates on the same principle as the photographs. From one initial viewpoint – where a camera would stand, for instance – there is a legible tableau of a woman and a man posing. From other vantage points they dissolve into a scatter of autonomous and variously sized body parts dispersed over a distance 20 feet deep.
Levy has created sculptural works based on figurative representation since 1990. Her works have been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego; the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City; the Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the University of Illinois at Chicago; the Peter Miller and Wood Street galleries in Chicago; and “Pier Walk 98” at ART CHICAGO 1997.
Nina Levy was born in Los Angeles in 1967. She was educated at Yale University, and received an MFA from the University of Chicago. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
An illustrated catalogue (No.9) will accompany this exhibition.