Hannah Levy, Untitled (2023), via Casey Kaplan
On view this month at Casey Kaplan’s Manhattan exhibition space presents a body of new wall and freestanding works by artist Hannah Levy, continuing the artist’s challenging and exploratory work in concepts around the human form, and concepts of its transcendence. Here, incorporating glass into the artist’s practice, Levy takes on new material processes through both traditional and experimental methods to arrive at new interpolations of her already tightly-honed practice.
Concentrating her source material—which spans vegetables, medical equipment, prosthetics, and furniture—on forms that implicate mobility aids, Levy considers our physical and psychological relationships to our built environment. A series of unique steel railings line the walls of the exhibition, inviting support while remaining untouchable. Thorns punctuate the rails’ sinuous curves, poised to pierce the hands that seek to bear their weight. Rather than aid, they deter, seemingly warning viewers of their own frailty. Other barbs cradle deflated, multi-hued glass casts of gourds, a reoccurring motif that is rendered with blown glass for the first time. Akin to diseased, flaccid flesh, the glass gourds sag over each rail like fruit on a vine, deflating as they rot.
Hannah Levy, Untitled (2023), via Casey Kaplan
Hannah Levy, Untitled (2023), via Casey Kaplan
In one work, a freestanding sculpture that models a chair, the artist employs slumped glass (a process that uses gravity and heat from a kiln to shape sheet-glass using a mold) to create swelling, bulbous forms that emphasize the connections between usable and unusable body structures, muscles in a state of atrophy and rendered dependent on these external, skeletal forms.
Two unique sets of polished stainless-steel sculptures resemble stilts. Constructed using a modular ball and socket joint system, the carved talons are newly articulated and robust, updated from Levy’s earlier iterations of the same kind. They resemble the feet of a bird of prey, a brutal interpretation of the clawfoot supports of freestanding bathtubs that gained popularity around the turn of the 20th century. Levy’s references for the ‘shoe’ of the sculpture lie in high fashion stilettos, with pointed metal toe boxes that incite a tactile memory of soft tissue squeezed into a too-tight shoe.
Hannah Levy, Crutch (Installation View), via Casey Kaplan
Levy’s work interrogates and examines the body in relation to modern technology, posing these notions in purely pysical rather than digital space, and painting a new concept of the body suspended amid a range of external agents.
The show closes April 29th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Hannah Levy at Casey Kaplan [Exhibition Site]
