Amy Butowicz

Peninsula is pleased to present Rapture in the Fold, a solo exhibition showcasing multimedia artist Amy Butowicz’s latest works on paper. Her current series of sumi ink, graphite, watercolor, and gouache drawings are heavily influenced by texts on feminism and phenomenology, particularly those by feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz and philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Julia Kristeva. Their writings take on the concept of human skin as an enveloping, protective surface, but without boundaries, which also conversely acts as a conduit of sensation and a connective loop between the body’s physical and mental interiors and the elements of the outside world.

Butowicz expresses these ideas by depicting interfacing masses of human and equine forms, meshed together into fleshy Möbius strips. Fingers, feet, hands, limbs, and hooves are coiled and splayed across the plane of the paper, folding, and melding into each other. Interiors bleed into exteriors, boundaries are established only to dissolve. Her use of color seamlessly alternates between being solid, opaque geometric bands and thin, diffuse blotches which permeate and defy physical limits, amplifying the artworks' unorientable quality. What is inside simultaneously is outside, the line between figure and terra firma is blurred. Touch, sensation, and skin contact are portrayed as liberatory, breaking down the confines of dualism.

The artist also embodies these ideas within her process of making this new series of drawings. To Butowicz, paper itself is a flesh-like surface. The act of mark-making on paper is an instantaneous expression of her body’s movement and physicality. Butowicz works on the floor, crawling, leaning on, and pressing her body against the paper as she creates, all of which becomes visually tangible in the final artworks. She looks toward a quote by Kristeva while drawing; “No distance between the thought and the hand: their instantaneous unity grasps and redraws the most concentrated interiority into visible bodies.” Each drawing becomes an encapsulation of a present moment, an ephemeral touch perfectly preserved. In Butowicz’s words, her drawings “create a fissure or a glitch between two possible worlds.”

Amy Butowicz was born and raised in Akron Ohio. She received a BA in Studio Art from the University of Colorado at Boulder and her MFA from Hunter College in New York City. Her practice moves fluidly between painting and sculpture to create allegorical narratives that explore the sexual body and its degeneration. Butowicz has been awarded several fellowships, scholarships and residencies including the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Commonwealth University’s Summer Studio Program. She was also a 2019 nominee for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. Her recent solo exhibitions include Pantomime at The Dairy Center for the Arts in Boulder, Colorado, Inhabit at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, A Room to Hoist at Hunter College, New York City, New York and Hiding in Plain Sight at Underdonk, Brooklyn, New York.