Bare and Bitter Sleep

Once Bitten

Forget everything I said before about littleness. Well, not everything, but add the following: when the ideas an artist explores inhabit the territory of quiet, fraught, personal moments, when the idea requires holding the breath and leaning in to examine the trace of a stolen encounter, then littleness is right. Littleness is good. Audrey Ward's Kissed & Bitten at Henley Studios is an example of this.

Kissed & Bitten is Ward's SCAD MFA thesis show, and in it she takes two very intimate acts--kissing and biting--and ruminates on them in seemingly endless ways in a variety of media.

Zipper, porcelain, glaze, thread, 10" x 21", 2007

Most of the works in the show are appropriately small. They take place on the intimate scale of the mouth and in the temporal span of a second; the amount of time it takes to bite down or pucker up.

Nesting Kiss, brass wire, porcelain, 1" x 1", 2008

Many of the works featured idiosyncratic little shapes derived from either kissing or biting down on wet porcelain (or on some intermediate material whose shape was then cast in porcelain). Dentition, like a fingerprint, is unique, making at least the "bite" pieces unique records of the artist's touch.

Voodoo Kiss, porcelain, straight pins, 3" x 3", 2008

By bringing kisses and bites together, Ward explores the porous boundary between the two actions, and therefore the anxious slippage between affection and cruelty, pleasure and pain. I started to write about eroticism when I looked at Deborah McClary's work last week, but couldn't shoehorn it in. It's just as well; Audrey Ward's work is sexy all over the gallery even as it refuses the final climax and denies the final ejaculation behind a veil of pristine colorlessness.

Kiss and Bite Jars, glass jars, porcelain, 48" x 6" x 6", 2008

Kiss and Bite Jars (details),

The lone video in the show made the pain/pleasure slippage most explicit. A pair of cameras trained on 2 faces, both of which appear to be Ward herself, show us the two women interacting in split screen. They bite each others fingers, slap each other, and generally appear to test the limits of each other's pain, which mostly causes them to giggle and show a great amount of pleasure sitting at the nexus of painful acts.

video still

The video reminded me of White Flag's "Provincial Gallery Simulator" (St. Louis) in which visitors are given the opportunity to be slapped by a White Flag gallery attendant and then sold a print of the moment the hand made contact with the face. Mostly this prompts the slapped to giggle and feel like part of the art making act. Ward is a little less sadistic and mocking.

video still

It was nice to see a young artist flexing some conceptual muscle while working out her ideas in ways that reserved retinal and tactile pleasure in her aesthetic formulas.

Light Blue, porcelain, gold leaf, thread, 10" x 10", 2008

Ward was served well by her sense of eccentric and improvisational composition--a random gold leaf here, the contrapuntal visual snap of a piece of string there--which was echoed even in the flower arrangement beneath the show's vinyl lettered title.

Sometimes the work veered toward the conceptually cutesy, e.g., "Dog Bite" consisted of a postcard for the show bitten and chewed up by a dog, which may have been meant as a joke, but if so it's cheap against everything else in the show.

Dog Bite, Bitten by The Duke, the dog, 2008

And sometimes an idea looked good, but worked only because of the buoying context of the other works around it.

One Kiss and 1000 Kisses, paint on paper, 60" x 6" x 28" (each), 2008

1000 Kisses (detail)

But these are forgivable lapses in a thesis show in which an artist is very visibly working out her ideas.

Hello, Good Bye, FREE Kisses

Henley Studios is in the newly revamped 280 Elizabeth Street in Inman Park, sitting on prime real estate among no shortage of hipster bars and eateries. Henley describes itself as "a creative solutions company that engages diverse audiences in the powerful experience of artistic invention and serves as a catalyst for the creation of new work that inspires and challenges." I don't know what that means. All I know is it says "creative solutions company" which sends a chill up my spine, a chill that came from 1998.

studio spaces at 280 Elizabeth Street

The choice of Audrey Ward as an opening act, however, tells me their vision is much better than their writing. Recommended if you're in the area. But move fast. The show ends May 17. If you sneeze, you'll miss this one.