In The Body Speaks, the human figure takes centre stage. Throughout the exhibition, artists experiment with form, colour, and gestural mark-making to imbue the human figure with the power to express what is usually kept hidden within. Here, inner conflicts, trauma, memories, dreams, and nightmares are transmuted into the visual world and given language through the disruption of the physical body.
In one work, two bodies merge and disappear into one another through an act of violent struggle. In another, lustrous, satin-like skin shudders and swells into balloon-like, billowing forms. Elsewhere, a physical form begins to ooze and spread across the composition as if it were viewed through a distorted glass. In a different work, an outstretched limb effaces itself and evolves into scratchy, bewildering abstraction on the canvas. From this, it is clear that the bodies within The Body Speaks are not quite stable. They are not closed-off, finished units. Instead, they are ever-changing, visual manifestations of the artist coming to terms with the constant, mystifying fluctuations of human emotion.
Each work within The Body Speaks depicts the human form on the precipice. Throughout the show, fleshy figures squirm, writhe, and contort themselves into entirely new bodily configurations. The viewer watches as each molten form begins to soften, seep, and overflow its own boundaries before finally coagulating and fusing the disparate parts together once again. As a result, the bodies depicted within The Body Speaks seem to be permanently on the brink of total metamorphosis, as if the artist has captured the swirling, seething stages before a new, altered form is brought into existence.
