DONNA HUANCA: ECHO IMPLANT

Crush Part 2, 2015. Clothing, leather, silicone, Plexiglas, wood frame; 70 x 51 x 2 inches

Three years ago, on a  cold rainy winter day, I chanced upon a closing party for Donna Huanca, to whom I was quickly introduced. As we exchanged pleasantries I glanced around the gallery, which was hung to the rafters with the various details of her work. There were entire outfits of clothing pressed between panes of glass and framed; vaguely biomorphic masses that resembles torsos as tree stumps or compost cubes; mostly nude models with their bodies painted standing like statues on a balcony above or upon a shelf or pedestal upon the wall, staring blankly over the crowd; clearly Huanca desired to bridge the gap between introspection and spectacle.  

Cave Woman, 2015. Makeup on wool; 59 x 37 x 1 ½  inches

I recall the space of the Joe Sheftel Gallery. Tall and narrow, it gave the impression of being a marginal space, like a stage with the curtain down, after hours, or a forgotten alleyway. The way that Huanca’s work inhabits the space further deconstructs the decorum that usually invests gallery exhibitions. It’s as if we have exited a formal space and have entered one narrating the precincts of her consciousness. I recall being at first very taken by the objectness in her work--her regard for the innate presence of any object associated with the body, or in some way representing a body, giving presence through sensuality. These manifestations have to be described to be given justice.

Screiii, 2015. Platex, velvet, nylon, and metal; 58 x 30 x 22 inches

 

The more I look at images from the exhibition, the more that I understand that Huanca views herself as an arranger of space rather than a maker of objects--a generator of dynamically charged arrangements that sometimes offer a degree of performance. There does not have to be much motion involved, for naked bodies in themselves are inherently dramatic, even when perfectly still. We learned this from Vanessa Beecroft in the Nineties. However there is a world of difference between erotism and action. Anyone can be emboldened by desire, and anyone can use it. It is the specific usage to which Huanca puts these bodies—to energize a visual language about the use of space—that matters.

KZ2009, 2015. Plaster and latex paint on canvas; 60 x 48 x 1 ¾ inches

Huanca’s work revolves around the body, presuming some interest in performance but delivering a hybrid between narrative and static symbolism. To be sure, there are performances scattered among her installations, for after all, how long could the spectator be expected to merely stare at bodies without expecting them to move, to do something human? “Echo Implant” was a loaded set that provided further cues for the curious on the nature of bodies.       

Bukket, 2015. Ceramic, fabric, wood, Plexiglas; 54 x 18 x 18 inches

 

My experience of the show was different from other exhibitions at galleries in one regard. Though I had peered around the installation and must have seen the bodies of her human mannequins, I was not completely aware of them as actual bodies. Not as skin, muscle, sweat, chill, nipple. Once I had it transformed my experience of the exhibition, altering my degree of emotional distance, my intellectual engagement with the other objects was pushed into a subconscious corner while I stared up at these mute players standing listlessly on plinths. All the other art works, which referenced a body, or the absence of one, could have easily come off of these specific bodies. The exhibition as a whole began to make sense, to become less amorphous, and to relate not only a language of the body as implied, but as a body palpable and evident. I felt the strength of Huanca’s vision. Here was not merely a gallery as an isolated space, one of many small rooms along a street of similar spaces, like a shop in a Parisian Arcade, but a room like a stage where the proscenium is everywhere, especially on the edge of the subconscious mind of its occupants, who becomes instant players. The aesthetic experience is made complete by bringing art objects as suggestive artifacts into the territory of the actual body. They clothe it without intention. 

 

Gala Tears, 2015. Clothing in Plexiglas with metal frame; 48 ½ x 36 ½ x 1 ¾ inches

 

In the art world we are conditioned to see everything as a construct, and to organize complex systems of reasoning around such constructs. Yet the presence of something real and human pulls us from our perch in the cerebral and thrusts us back into the visceral. Suddenly we are reacting instinctually. We begin to distrust our reactions, and to distrust the reasoning, and its related assumptions, behind these reactions, which fall farther and farther from something meaningful in an intimate fashion. Huanca puts us on equal footing with our shared humanity.