March 10 – March 13
Curator: Madeleine Morris
Artists: Giovanna Pedrinola and Shane Weiss

Shane Weiss and Giovanna Pedrinola explore themes of the body as it exists in and interacts with surrounding and internal space. In Embodied Space, Weiss and Pedrinola consider the formal elements of medium, material and activation of the space around their works. 

Rigid architectural geometry meets the organic suppleness of fabric in Pedrinola’s drawings and installations. Born in Brazil, Pedrinola utilizes her personal and artisticheritage in her works, which include drawing, sculpture, textile, and performance to engage with visual, auditory, and haptic sensation. In her drawing Un Ricordo Toscano, Pedrinola selects an architectural detail observed during her studies in Florence and magnifies this into a large-scale colored pencil work. The delicate, neatly colored shapes form geometric patterns, emphasizing the flatness of the drawing while evoking the three-dimensional source. Pedrinola accentuates physicality of craft, in particular quilt patterns, and the bodily intervention of the artist in her hand-dyed linen work Untitled 2020. This brightly colored geometric grid’s loose and wavy forms highlight the hand-made nature of the piece, emphasizing the physical process of constructing its components. Her use of wearable materials underscores the physicality and malleability of fabric; when Pedrinola drapes her fabric pieces onto dancers in her Untitled performance piece, the fabric material is made bodily by the performer. Pedrinola uses these different media to engage with layered intersectionsbetween the body of the artist to the physicality of artwork as well as the viewer’s sensory connection to the surfaces of her drawings and textile works.

While Pedrinola considers the movement of the body within a space, Weiss highlights the physical and corporeal experience of the body as a space. In Caved, Poolside, Weiss constructs an oozing black mass resembling an ambiguous visceral substance; however, at the same time, the form has an organic pumice-stone-like texture. Weiss utilizes scale to recontextualize this clot-like form, allowing the physical presence of bodily components to exist as both repelling and compelling. Weiss expands on their considerations of the body as a space in Untitled installation. Weiss takes apart components of the body and reassembles them, bringing the interior viscera into the open. They engage the viewer into the exploratory process of close looking through scale wherein the massive size leaves the work always partially obscured, forcing the viewer to interact with and therefore animate the space. The play between obscuring and revealing forms parallels performances of gender and experiences of embodiment. Utilizing prosthetics and special effects makeup, Weiss considers the body itself as a malleable medium, highlighting the flexibility and fluidity of physical presentation. Weiss incorporates these experimental facial transformations in performance to enliven and inject narrative into the installation. 

Pedrinola and Weiss both consider interrelationships between bodies and the spaces they occupy through manipulation of scale. Pedrinola’s process-oriented, meditative practice emphasizes the physical bodily intervention of the artist in a work and connects the viewer’s physical presence to surface and texture. By contrast, Weiss considers the body in its corporeal physicality, breaking apart components to reconsider embodiment as a context. These two artists marshal their different media and approaches to consider the multifaceted aspects of embodiment as and within a physical space.

Download the category entry for Embodied Space [PDF]