Kiki Smith A Gathering 1980-2005

Kiki Smith A Gathering 1980-2005

I visited the Kiki Smith’s exhibits at the Whitney Museum, and was excited by her originality and her interaction with the human form, more often the female form and its various manifestations.

“Best known for her descriptions of the human form-both in anatomical fragments and in full figure-she is a remarkable innovator in sculpture, printmaking and drawing...she uses the body as a metaphor, drawing upon science, faith and folklore to consider our strengths and frailties”
She uses diverse materials like Nepalese handmade paper, paper mache, glass, terra-cotta, plaster, wax or bronze.

The first image, is the All Souls exhibit. The numerous images of the fetus reminds me of lots of ultra sounds drawn and celebrates the birth of the human baby.
All Souls
1. 1988
screen print on handmade Thai tissue paper
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Riva Castleman Endowment Fund, 2003
Smith has always been concerned with the human body, and among her earliest preoccupations were the subjects of birth and death. Many of her first pieces are composed of multiple components in varied configurations. For All Souls, Smith screen printed numerous copies of a fetus image that she found in a Japanese anatomy book. The individual sheets are glued together to form a curtain of delicate paper that hangs, unframed, on the wall. While often interpreted as referencing the anti-feminist and anti-abortion backlashes of the late 1980s, this work also has a more metaphorical meaning for the artist, who notes that every individual must undergo the process of being born. The title alludes to All Souls' Day, a Catholic feast day celebrated on November 2, when the faithful pray for the souls of the dead who have not yet fully atoned for their sins.

Next to All Souls are science experiment like jars with gothic handwriting with labels like Semen, Urine, Blood, Pus and Vomit. It connects to all souls as being the source of creating the baby.

Haber Arts describes it below.

In fact, the work that one sees first contains nothing but air. Twelve large, empty water bottles look as if they should hold specimens from an antique laboratory. A later room indeed arranges objects from throughout her career in what she calls a cabinet of wonders. Here only the Gothic lettering on each bottle identifies its contents with what a certain film character calls his "precious bodily fluids," from semen and blood to pus and vomit. The curator, Siri Engberg of the Walker Arts Center, identifies some as life sustaining and some as disease bearing. Like the implicit calendar of months, however, they suggest not a division but a continuous cycle between the body and the world—and they do nothing to make it sound pretty.

At first, the frankness reflects literal studies of anatomy. She worked on an emergency medical team and saw her sister die of AIDS. Bronze casts represent the male and female uro-genital system, another confluence of waste and generation. Before long, though, her approach to the body turns on the transformation between object and image. Human hair and sheep wool join in a Dowry Cloth. A wall of small, thin aluminum plates represents torn and beaten skin.

Dowry cloth made by Human hair and sheep wool created a textural element to the exhibit.

Another interesting bronze sculpture was a flock of birds that had been preserved. It seemed they were sitting on an electrical pole. Each bird was uniquely different, but they looked the same if you saw it from a distance.

Flock
1. 1998
bronze
Collection of the American Contemporary Art Foundation Inc., Leonard A. Lauder, President
Images of animals, particularly birds, have appeared in Smith's work since 1992. In many of these pieces she examines the relationship between humans and animals as seen through scientific study, religion, and literature. Birds have often served as symbols in art, representing such intangibles as the Holy Spirit, freedom, love, and enlightenment. Flock comprises more than two hundred bronze reliefs, which she traced from preserved bird specimens at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. Although their arrangement on the wall is random, the more or less orderly rows of tightly bound bodies remind us that human manipulation, rather than the natural instincts of the birds themselves, assembled this particular flock. By making animal sculptures that are equal in importance to her human representations, Smith creates her own system of classification that rejects the idea of a hierarchical order among living organisms.

Her work was had a handmade quality, but also metaphorical as the images of birds and the jars of human wastes. Her placements of objects next to each other was interesting, for instance the womb was a bronze shaped cavity that opened like a box, next to a rib cage. The sculpture Rapture (2001) depicts a woman emerging from the belly of a wolf, alludes to the narrative of rebirth and the story of “the little red riding hood”. Her multi layered objects and study of the female form was novel and fresh.

See an interview with the artist.

NPR has a multimedia exhibit of her work