‘Time does not change us. It just unfolds us’ wrote the playwright Max
Frisch. Juliana Leite’s artistic concerns seem to accord with this
sentiment. In Portmanteau – her exhibition at London’s TJ
Boulting gallery – the unfurling is corporeal. The sculptures and photos
on show are all self-portraits that record her past physical activity
while – she asserts – pointing towards a new and more general vision of
embodiment.
The process by which Leite creates many of her large-scale sculptures
can be characterized thus: creating a void in a large volume of clay and
then producing a positive cast of this space out of plaster or latex.
The first aspect is realized by laborious pushing, crawling, scratching
and climbing her way into the material without the help of tools. As she
does so Leite is unclothed, affecting the tactile qualities of the
finished cast – impressions of feet, knees, elbows and fingers defining
the surface condition, frozen imprints of her movements while removing
material. The general scale of the final piece relates to the
dimensions of her own physique and the range of motion she has
undertaken.
The exhibition’s centerpiece, V (2012), was created in response
to the gallery’s architecture, whose basement level is only accessible
by a set of stairs. The object was cast in latex from a clay mold
replicating the form of this built aspect, through which the artist
moved, creating two negative figures – ascending and descending.
Referencing the modernist trope of the nude descending a staircase
– inspired by Duchamp’s response to Edweard Muybridge’s photo studies
of human movement – the work positions Leite as both subject and object,
actor and observed.
While serving a practical function, Leite’s nudity also plays a key role
in her sculptures’ aesthetic import. According to the artist, because
garments can get attached to the clay and impede her task she must do
away with them. But she also maintains that wearing clothing would date
the works and that body casting allows her to imply a transhistorical
field: foregrounding primal interactions between the human form, its
strength and ability to move through space, and matter. The Baconian
notion that the physical world is consistently subservient to our
desires is, she writes in a statement accompanying the exhibition, part
of a status quo in need of overturning. ‘One of the reasons I use so
much density of material is that I want to put myself in a position
where matter is in just as much in control as me’, she states. ‘My work
is a negotiation’.
That this negotiation involves some drama is manifest in the haptic
qualities of the finished cast, but there are other dialogues between
the artist and her medium that are not voiced in the exhibition. In
order to stabilize the heavy clay into which she must climb Leite builds
large wooden structures that sometimes resemble over-sized coffins.
These are demolished once the cast is produced. A pity – as there is an
interesting tension between the endurance of confinement so central to
her sculptural process and the expansive, somewhat wild forms that
eventually go on display.
Oscillation between constraint and control, fixity and the possibilities
of movement, is one of the exhibition’s key themes. All the works on
show portray embodiment as a set of coexisting possibilities; mutable
and multi-faceted, not so much conditioned by obvious social
over-determinations as the ability to re-define space. While V captures Leite’s actions in their messy aspect – all lumpy yellowish latex – her Multiplied
images marshal symmetry, superimposition and the slick hues of the
C-type to beautiful effect. Through their many exposures – up to twenty –
various moments are compressed into a single image. This photographic
overlapping of Leite’s figure in numerous positions seems to be an
attempt to convey an expanded sense of embodiment, perhaps an assertion
of its polymorphic essence. Following on from The Singularity
(2009) series in which the artist performed her own Vitruvian Woman for
the camera – a full body rotation in a custom built circular climbing
frame, her navel the only fixed point in the multiple exposure – these
pictures recall the many-limbed goddesses of Hindu art. Once again,
destruction and creation, limitation and the suggestion of infinity,
wrestle in figural and metaphorical fields – yet, all the while, it is
just her.
To make something from nothing – or from something close to nothing – is
the work of the divine. It should be noted that ancient myths
characterize the labour of Ur-creators as a kind of sculptural practice.
Hesiod’s Prometheus creates man from clay, as does Allah, and in
Genesis the Lord makes use of dust. In the manner of an everyday
demiurge Leite recasts empty space as physical substance with Voids
(2012), located towards the back of the gallery. These amorphous forms
were produced by the artist’s carrying out the rotational arm and leg
movements commonly used in dance training to carve away areas of wet
plaster from the space immediately surrounding her body, leaving only
isolated remnants – each corresponding to what would otherwise be the
voids underneath and between her limbs. This group of sculptural
remainders constitutes the artist’s meditation on the empty space so
crucial to Henry Moore’s late work and it is impossible to ignore their
oversize phallic shapes. It would seem, therefore, that Leite’s
production of voids pursues the castration of at least one male god of
sculpture, and the performance of her own erections in place of his
work.
A portmanteau is a combination of two or more words that create a single
new word. Continuing to flesh out this mission statement, Leite’s
exhibition features more composite imaging than the C-Type photographs
hitherto discussed, in the form of the video Collaboration Katie #1 (2012) and her Summertime Blues
(2012) series of cyanotypes. The canvases of the latter were dipped in
potassium ferricyanide and ammonium citrate, producing a light sensitive
surface that turns deep blue when exposed to the sun. The imagery
itself was created outdoors on a roof in mid-summer Brooklyn. Also
multiple exposures, Leite held two consecutive poses to produce each
image, the second a mirror inversion of the first, while crouching atop
the fabric. The resulting chronophotographs are a synthetic compound of
unusual anatomy, impossible bodies made feasible by the mechanics of
visually compressing time. The evidence of the summer heat and her hard
work is recorded in the starburst forms produced by her dripping sweat.
With this exhibition Leite has produced a multifaceted body of work, the
art-historical, idealist and psychoanalytic implications of which
exceed the scope of a review of this length. Portmanteau suggests that
the artist’s negotiation with the limitations and ecstasies of sculpted
human form has only just begun. As with her sculptures, further moments
beckon.