Human and Beyond

August 26, 2022 – November 27, 2022
Admission: FREE

Human and Beyond brings together work by four artists who use bodies–human and beyond–to explore notions of beauty and transformation.

Catalina Ouyang | Raúl de Nieves | Cajsa von Zeipel | Jennifer Angus

• Catalina Ouyang engages object-making, interdisciplinary environments, and time-based projects to examine themes of desire, subjugation, and dissidence. The artist’s intuitive use of organic, inorganic, and conceptual material is simultaneously poetic, apocalyptic, primordial, and abject. Using form, movement, and relational engagement either to expand or fragment subjectivity, the works propose the body as a politicized landscape subject to partition.
• Raúl de Nieves is a multimedia artist, performer, and musician whose wide-ranging practice investigates notions of beauty and transformation. De Nieves’s visual symbolism draws on both classical Catholic and Mexican vernacular motifs to create his own unique mythology that often challenges and explores themes of sexuality, the human body, and individual and public histories. Having learned traditional Latin American sewing and beadwork at school and alongside family members, his work pays tribute to and invents upon traditional forms. Through processes of accumulation and adornment, the artist transforms readily available materials into spectacular objects, which he then integrates into immersive narrative environments.
• Cajsa von Zeipel is a sculptor whose work delves into identity, gender, queerness and normativity. She has become known for her white, large-scale plaster sculptures but in her recent works she has left the reference to classical sculpture and developed an even more complex technique. von Zeipel constructs her female figures in pastel coloured silicone in an evocation of sci-fi and fantasy aesthetics.  Beneath the silicone there are parts of mannequins, objects that are typically used to construct desire in capitalist spaces. Sawing off limbs and reconnecting disparate pieces, von Zeipel destroys their normative bodies; rather than statically holding clothes, these reconfigured forms take on uncanny movements. Limbs shake, fingers bend, skin wrinkles, and mouths fall in a manner that mimics our own physicality.
• Creating beautiful, highly intricate patterns by pinning thousands of insect specimens to a wall, Jennifer Angus’s installations invite both apprehension and wonder. Her work seeks to provoke a series of increasingly urgent questions about our perceptions and what we value and protect: Are we big or small? Do individuals make a difference? What are the stories we need to tell, and those we need to change? For her installation at Kimball Art Center, she is planning something that is dark, sad, and rather dramatic, possibly using black walls and lighting with chandeliers.