Cathy de Monchaux at Sean Kelly - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The English artist Cathy de Monchaux, in her first American solo (she has shown widely in Europe since finishing a Goldsmiths' MA in carbonized iron and leather constructions that are simultaneously threatening, ornamental and erotic. As a curious continuation to Marina Abramovic's blood-and-bones exhibit at Kelly, most of these six works allude to intimate muscle and fat Coincidentally, their multiple small parts, laborious assembly and prominent materiality looked echoed all over SoHo - in the obsessive work and nonart materials of Tom Friedman at Feature and in the meticulously crafted "Labor of Love" pieces at the fresh Museum, to name just sum of two units instances.

Most of the works call forth Gothic and Neo-Gothic decoration. individual includes repeated batlike shapes that direct the eye like hinges or drawer shakes Another is like a line of spikes atop a wrought-iron hedge A third gives a whiplash line. And a certain quantity of Mornings I Didn't Want To procure Up At All looks like a whip of prodigious extent It coils 37 1/2 feet from a metal wall attachment that takes the form of a repulsive skeletal or robotic hand to extremity in a venomous brass stinger. Leather, metal and whips make a fair strong S&M allusion, but de Monchaux's work is far too varied to be held to that.

She is Not I wraps around an outside corner of the gallery wall@ sum of two units vertical rectangles of delicately blue-green glass, cushioned from the wall by means of silk and goosedown pillows (the checklist with equal reason specifies), are held in place by means of two tubes of pink leather sewn together down their extent These thick thongs are stretched, stitches on the outside from four handlike metal brackets. The combination of protection and coercion typifies the inversions in the work: impressible luxurious, fragile, potentially violent.

Another piece attached to an inside corner in the gallery. Balmy Rusty injurys over 10 feet tall, is a multilayered leather upon the outside, that about each 6 inches is pulled make open by metal fingers to reveal fat pink labial folds. Cruising Disaster is the spiky work. The overall shape of this three-part approximately 18-foot-long horizontal piece is like a parade of millipedes. on the contrary examined up close - and all of de Monchaux's works twitch you up close before making you back not on - it consists of spikes that shoot out from the top and bottom of pink and gray pouchs of leather. The first and third parts look intimately female, while the simple bodys of the central on - a circulared pink part starting to push its way without of a gray cover - are suggestively phallic.

De Monchaux qualifys sexual allusion with a decorative reiteration that pushes her work toward abstraction. Her intensive handwork, especially her sewing of the parts, strike one as beings like a feminist endorsement of traditionally devalued domestic skills. Still, the works are anything on the other hand cliches of passive or charming femininity. Her titles appear to come from another place entirely, perhaps the tabloid pres or randomly heard fragments of ordinary talk; they explain nothing on the other hand add to the disturbing cutting side of this strange and compelling works.

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