Huguette Caland, Kiki Kogelnik, Lynn Hershman Leeson: Surrogates / Sam Moyer: Flowers 
May 11–July 6, 2019

Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present Surrogates, a group show bringing together three prominent artists for the first time: Huguette Caland, Kiki Kogelnik, and Lynn Hershman Leeson.

The work in Surrogates investigates the use and visibility of the female body. Each of the artists make work that can stand-in for different aspects of the female form in the physical, social, and political capacities. The works included are from the early 1960s through the 1990s and cover a large swath of time that witnessed an evolution of feminist waves. The artists included not only predicted significant movements but also contributed to the changing discourse.

The 1980s witnessed artworks that were critically engaged with mass-media’s role in the patriarchal construction of the “woman.” Kiki Kogelnik created one of her first works in the mid-1960s culling directly from advertisements and their portrayal of the female form. She astutely critiqued the image and dissected it’s construct by pulling it apart and reassembling it—sometimes reimagining it as a robot or some other artificial object. Similar to Kogelnik, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s series Phantom Limb depicts the absorption of a female identity into technology by merging female bodies with machinery. Predating the advent of Photoshop these black and white photo collages replace the limbs of beckoning women with objects such as electric plugs, televisions, clocks and cameras. Born in Lebanon, Huguette Caland’s paintings flourished upon her move to Paris in the 1970s. Her body of work is a cohesive exploration of self and more so, a push back against societal codes. The paintings included in the exhibition exploit sexuality; they portray fluid, blurred and morphing figures representing the body as a universal subject.

Surrogates is a study of the spectacle of bodies and their subjectivities in both the real and the imagined world. The work selected for this exhibition all operate as an avatar for one aspect of the female form. In all instances, the form has either shifted from one mechanism to another, is represented in a fragmented shape, or act as a metaphor of a complex social and political body.

In the south gallery, Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present Flowers, an exhibition of new works by Sam Moyer.

Comprising eight wall works and one outdoor sculpture, Flowers marks Moyer’s initial foray into figurative representation. Flowers, a symbol of growth and the transience of nature, are represented here in hard and lasting stone, merging temporality and transience with permanence and solidity.

Over the past five years, Moyer has embraced the tension between painting and sculpture through the process of fitting repurposed stone into hand painted canvas mounted to MDF panel. In Flowers the artist assembles found scraps into floral forms that look strikingly naturalistic while retaining the improvisational quality of past works. Moyer’s flowers, inspired by Ellsworth Kelly’s plant drawings, have a hand-drawn quality—line, contrast, and design are essential pictorial elements. Slower and quieter than their precursors and comprised of smaller fragments, the works on view in Flowers build on the goal of balanced composition via improvised geometry toward the additional end of resemblance through representation.

Outside the gallery, a free standing sculpture continues the project of challenging medium-specificity. Two human-sized stone monoliths lean against each other secured by a Japanese joint usually reserved for woodcraft.

Sam Moyer’s works are included in prominent collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; The Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; and the Davis Museum, Wellesley College, MA. Moyer has exhibited her work at The Drawing Center, New York; The Bass Museum, Miami, FL; University of Albany Art Museum, New York; The Public Art Fund, New York; White Flag Projects and The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO; LAND, Los Angeles; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; and Société, Berlin. Moyer has participated in important group exhibitions including, Inherent Structure, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Painting/Object, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Greater New York and Between Spaces at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens, and in 2018 she was the subject of a solo presentation at Art Basel Unlimited. Sam Moyer received her BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design; her MFA from Yale; and she lives and works in Brooklyn.