Nude

Lin Qiqing, Anam Rani, Noel de Lesseps, Elise Rise, Jeanie Yoo, Kemar Keanu Wynter

Psychic Readings is pleased to present Nude, a group show featuring the work of six artists.

A body laid bare. A brief glimpse at someone changing through a window. Nudity carries a different weight than nakedness, the latter which is charged with sexuality; the former, a restfulness, a tacit confidence. Does disrobing imply disclosure or does it simply tease the onlooker with another enigmatic layer? The clinical terminology, nudity as substrata striptease—epidermis, dermis, hypodermis—only reminds the visually hungry that stripping down will always allude to something still hidden. In his novel The Reprieve, Jean-Paul Sartre summarizes such transitory revelations in Philippe’s depiction of Irene: “the nudity of that feminine body had risen into her face, the body had reabsorbed it, as nature reabsorbs forsaken gardens.” To be nude then is to be exposed with a secret kept, a story still untold, and yet simultaneously unfolding. A nakedness that is, in its very essence, sheathed. To stand nude is a gesture of intimate declaration that is as fixed as it is fugitive.

Nude also elicits transparency. In contemporary discourse the word connotes an intentional movement toward truth, equating being transparent with hiding nothing; if one speaks for the sake of full transparency, one is willing to shed harsh light upon an issue, expose someone or be exposed themself. But tracing the word to its Medieval Latin origin transparentem we find a richer and more mystifying meaning: “to show light through.” The root trans “across, beyond” + parere “appear, submit” suggests that transparency is also about movement and permeability.

It is from this place the viewer approaches Nude. Rather than a point of access it is the locus for contemplation. To gaze upon the works as if to graze upon bare skin; a delicate touch which reminds all that cannot be grasped, like tracing lightly along a pool of water only to find oneself plunged into unconscious depths and imagined futures.

Nude features new work by six artists. Pakistani-born artist Anam Rani’s sculptures reanimate, reshape, and reclaim familiar objects’ significance to bridge worlds tangible and imagined, while the figures in Jeanie Yoo’s paintings investigate flesh as body, and flesh as family, highlighting its power vulnerability as a vessel to transcend the corporeal while simultaneously calling one back home; Elise Rise’s paintings of fruit bodies explore the patterns that beget life when we slice through rind and skin to all that links us to nature, and Lin Qiqing’s woven paintings of linen, paper yarn, and mulberry paper reveal the infinitesimal fibers that constitute the internal struggle of being and existence; the small-scale paintings from Noel de Lesseps encourage proximity and boundlessness, the ecstatic marks and vibrant palette hinting toward untethered vitality; finally, Kemar Keanu Wynter’s abstract painting Urgent Rapture of Mind (Acai Bowl) beckons the viewer through a sensual field of pigment that reminds what has nourished us has also shaped us.

Together these works invite the viewer to enter into the intimacy of a singular, unfolding moment and ponder the fragility of the vessels which bore and contain us. Nude is an unzipping of temporality, a place to slip out of what has been ascribed upon us and instead meld with and reclaim personal histories and lineages—cultural, diasporic, and biological—a path to permeate the rich mysteries of our personhood.

—Julie Schulte