Prosthesis

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Prosthesis is a group exhibition featuring the work of three artists—Jillian Mayer, Martha Poggioli, and Fin Simonetti—whose practices interrogate symbolic assumptions surrounding the human body, particularly as we understand the body as gendered, or as politically subject to movements in culture, capital, and technology. 

Martha Poggioli’s practice is driven by exploring the histories of reproductive technology through pessaries—prosthetic devices for contraception, sterilization, medicinal or structural support for the internal architecture of the body. Researching and tracing the history of IUD patents from the Roman era to the Industrial Revolution to the present, she exploits their patterns and taxonomies, transforming them into aesthetic objects. Playing with scale and material, the artist abstracts, stretches, inflates, fragments, prints, and casts elements of these patent forms into either fleshy sculptural compositions, maps on translucent stretched silicone skins, or monoliths rendered in iron or bronze. By extracting the image of interior architectures into exterior ones, the Brancusi- like sculptures cast in bronze tend to question what constitutes a body? Poggioli believes that modernity’s legacy of standardization has imprinted itself on our bodies.(1) The work interrogates the long history of discourses that assert ideologies like religion and politics (in this case also intellectual property law) onto women’s bodies, which becomes ever-more urgent to consider in light of the dissolution of Roe v. Wade. 

Fin Simonetti often works in hand-carved stone, stained glass and drawing. Her work considers the entangled relationship between measures of control and yearning for security, rendering sculptural forms that represent both protection and vulnerability. Within her found barbershop poster series, parts of anonymous men in profile peek out from under Simonetti’s delicately-crafted, colored stained glass work. Each of the men’s ears are outlined by dainty quatrefoils, emphasizing the act of listening is often characterized as a passive, vulnerable act. References to chapel or cathedral architecture are intentional devices that the artist uses to tinker with the ways in which they elevate the status of images. As the artist has said, “In my work, religion comes up a lot as an entry point into magical thinking.”(2) Also presented in the exhibition is My Volition 2 (2021) a disembodied hind leg of a dog rendered exquisitely in honeycomb calcite, which rests on the edge of a steel railing protruding from the corner of two walls. The piece alludes both to defenselessness and forms of corporeal support. 

Since 2016, Jillian Mayer has been creating Slumpies, furniture-like objects that become gestural paintings you can sit on. A cheeky nod to Franz West’s “Adaptives” (“Passstücke”) which challenged the relationship between sculpture and furniture, art and utilitarian objects, Mayer’s Slumpies “acknowledge our ever-increasing relationship with technological devices, relieving us of the need to support our own bodies while we interface with the digital world.” (3) These vibrantly-colored, iridescent and intentionally bulky sculptures are designed to curve around the human body and, at times, prop up one’s iPhone closer to one’s face. Equal parts joke and threat, Slumpies elicit what Baudrillard called “the end of the body, of its history, and its vicissitudes.” (4) This exhibition is not concerned with a literal notion of prosthesis. Instead through the lenses of these artists’ practices, the exhibition considers the prosthetic nature of gender, of interiority and exteriority, organic and inorganic, macro and micro forms, suggesting these systems of knowledge, our ideologies are fraught, always, in their human construction. 

Identity itself is a prosthetic. As Donna Haraway posits in A Cyborg Manifesto (1984), “Liberation rests on the construction of consciousness, the imaginative (5) apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility.” 

At this moment, as AI encroaches, questions percolate: what of us could be replaced, outmoded by other knowledge and non-human constructions. 

-Kristin Korolowicz 

Haynes Court Bios 

Fin Simonetti is a Canadian artist and musician who lives and works in New York. She works in diverse media, including stone, stained glass, and drawing. Her work examines the entangled relationship between measures of control and desires for security, rendering sculptural forms that represent both protection and vulnerability. Simonetti’s recent solo exhibitions include Matthew Brown (Los Angeles), Cooper Cole (Toronto), Esker Foundation (Calgary), Company (New York), SIGNAL (Brooklyn) and Good Weather (North Little Rock, Chicago). Recent group exhibitions include Helena Anrather (New York), Moscow International Biennale (Moscow), Francesca Minini (Milan), and CLEARING (Brooklyn). Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, Art in America, The New Yorker, Cultured Magazine, and Canadian Art. She released her debut album ICE PIX on Hausu Mountain (Chicago). 

Martha Poggioli is an Australian artist. Within her sculptural practice, she works to uncover patterns, occurrences, and languages hidden within the vast constellation of human made things. Exploiting methodologies and legacies of design, she investigates material histories to address personal questions relating to embodiment, representation, and identity. Poggioli holds a BFA from Queensland University of Technology and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been shown at the Mütter Museum (Philadelphia), Kunstgewerbemuseum (Dresden), RMIT Design Hub (Melbourne), Julius Caesar (Chicago), SPACES (Cleveland), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center (Seattle), MassArt Art Museum (Boston), and Rhona Hoffman Gallery (Chicago). She is currently an artist-in- residence at Sharpe-Walentas in Brooklyn. 

Jillian Mayer is a Cuban-American artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Miami. Her moving image work, sculptures, digital interventions, and performances investigate the points of tension between our online and physical worlds–attempting to inhabit the increasingly porous boundary between the two. Solo exhibitions include Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha), Kunst
Aarhus (Aarhus), University of Buffalo Art Museum (Buffalo), Postmasters Gallery (New York), Pérez Art Museum (Miami), LAXART (Los Angeles), Utah Museum of Fine Art (Salt Lake City), and David Castillo Gallery (Miami). She has exhibited, screened films, and performed at MoMA PS1 (New York), MoMA (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (Miami), The Bass (Miami), Guggenheim Museum (New York), and the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, as a part of the 2014 Montréal Biennial. Mayer’s work has been featured in Artforum, Art Papers, Art in America, ArtNews, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times. Mayer is a recipient of the Creative Capital Fellowship, South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual/Media Artists Fellowship, Cintas Foundation Fellowship for Cuban Artists, and was named one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker Magazine. Mayer’s films have screened at festivals including Sundance, SXSW, Rottenberg Film Fest, and the New York Film Festival. She is a fellow of the Sundance Institute’s New Frontiers Lab and New Narratives on Climate Change Lab. 

Kristin Korolowicz is an independent curator and writer. She has held curatorial positions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Bass, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She earned her MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts. Over the
course of her career, she has worked with an array of emerging to established artists, such as: Ghada Amer & Reza Farkhondeh, Roman Ondák, Mark Dion, Felipe Mujica & Johanna Unzueta, Laurent Grasso, José Lerma, Sanford Biggers, Chemi Rosado-Seijo, and Theaster Gates, among others. Korolowicz’s forthcoming projects include curating a performance with artists Derrick Woods-Morrow and Gozié Ojini in conjunction with Woods-Morrow’s solo exhibition Gravity Pleasure Switchback at UIC’s Gallery 400 in summer of 2023. She is also researching and curating Braiding Histories, the first major solo exhibition of Victoria Martínez’s work, which will be on view at the Chicago Cultural Center in spring of 2024.