Jeff Bailey Gallery is pleased to present For The Partner, featuring sculptures by Fabienne Lasserre. This is her first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Lasserre’s sculptures evoke the body, or fragments of bodies. Their tactile surfaces invite touch, their disparate parts seem near collapse or change. Standing on the floor, suspended from the ceiling or hanging on the wall, the works hold a tension between the pathetic or awkward, and the playful and decorative.
Malleable materials such as linen, wool and felt (made by the artist) are combined with paper and paint. The sculptures develop fluidly through a process of accumulated gestures: warping, twisting, wrapping, stacking and draping. Many works seem concerned with the potential implied in precarious or unsettled states. Parts hang, dangle, lean and sag, evoking relations of desire, repulsion, aggression and affection.
The title of the exhibition, For The Partner, comes from Ursula LeGuin’s dedication in her science fiction book, The Dispossessed. LeGuin avoids the possessive pronoun and the legalistic noun (husband/wife) to suggest fluid gender roles and relationships. For Lasserre, science fiction’s departure from realism lets us question prevailing norms and beliefs, and re-evaluate what we assume to be natural. Species and genders often mix, binding masculine and feminine attributes. Similarly, Lasserre’s works exist in a state of paradox. Parts are reconfigured and joined in an on-going interrogation of standard perceptions of the body.
The importance of fluidity, irresolution and sense of touch in Lasserre’s process reflect an approach to making that is meandering and indirect rather than pointed and transcendental, and is indebted to feminist thought and art practice.
Lasserre’s work was included in a three-person exhibition at the gallery in spring of 2010. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally: including Gallery Diet, Miami (solo), and the New York venues Sikkema Jenkins & Co., Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and Regina Rex (group), and Espacio Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile (group). She is a 2008-09 recipient of the La Curtiduría residency in Oaxaca, Mexico. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2004. Lasserre lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.