I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC
Artists: Aaron Burr Society/Jim Costanzo, Matthew Askey, Claudia Baez, Ciro Beltran, Terry Berkowitz, Davis Birks, Eduardo Cervantes, Alexis de Chaunac, Gregory de La Haba, Adolfo Doring, Jeanette Doyle, Laura Elkins, Taka Fernandez, Fabian Freese, Noël Hennelly, Marie Christine Katz, Dabal Kim, Paul Loughney, Despo Magoni, Emma McCagg, Laura Mega, Lindsey Nobel, Julia San Martin, Sari Tervaniemi, Mehran Tizkar, Alvaro Verduzco, Etienne Warneck
Proyectos Raul Zamudio is pleased to present I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC, an international, mixed-media group exhibition. The exhibition will debut with a “soft” opening on August 13, followed by a closing reception during the first week of September to coincide with the Armory Art Fair and the beginning of New York City’s fall art season.
The exhibition’s takes its name from two disparate sources: one is the title of a poem by Walt Whitman written in 1855, and the other is an eponymous short story (1969) by the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. Both serve to bracket aspects of the quagmire we face today in a posthuman world regarding the human body. Whitman’s poem praises corporeality through a sensuous description of both male and female bodies that transcend dichotomies. It lyrically ruminates on what all humans share, yet at the same time, it also reminds us that our bodies are what partially forms our identity and makes each one of us unique and distinct. Bradbury’s story celebrates the body too, but it is the prosthetic and artificial body that takes place in the future where a family left without a mother who has passed, are able to procure a loving, android grandmother to replace her; however, unlike the human mother, the robot can never die. Although Bradbury’s story today seems dated in the technology it alludes, it is not without merit and is prescient regarding the anxiety about Artificial Intelligence: that it will make humans obsolete. The artists in the exhibition approach a myriad of questions and issues in their individual works about the body through figuration, pure abstraction, and text-based work in diverse media including, painting, sculpture, photography, work-on-paper, video, and performance.