Bosco Sodi’s “Perfect Bodies” offers alternate universes in Red Hook (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Pioneer Works at Perfect Bodies Auto Collision
184-186 Conover St., Red Hook
Saturdays & Sundays through December 20, free, noon – 7:00 pm
pioneerworks.org
www.boscosodi.com
perfect bodies slideshow
Mexico City-born, Brooklyn-based artist Bosco Sodi returns to Pioneer Works with another site-specific installation featuring organic materials facing deterioration and impermanence. Six years after the fifty-seven-foot-long polyptych The Last Day, a textured painting that cracked naturally, Sodi is back in Red Hook with “Perfect Bodies,” an outdoor exhibition consisting of dozens of clay spheres and cubes socially distanced in a fenced-in asphalt yard that would make a fine location for a Rudy Giuliani press conference. A few blocks from Pioneer Works’ home base at 159 Pioneer St., “Perfect Bodies” is situated in the vacant lot of the former home of Perfect Bodies Auto Collision and A. P. Fleet Service automotive repairs on Conover St. The more than two dozen imperfect spheres and three cubes were hand-formed from Oaxacan clay and fired in a DIY kiln on the beach; in the lot, they resemble a strange urban pumpkin patch, a field of dinosaur eggs, parents with small children, or a flat map of the universe, misshapen moons and planets degrading before our very eyes.
Bosco Sodi’s “Perfect Bodies” consists of clay spheres and cubes that degrade over time (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Like his cracking paintings, the objects crack over time, as does the ground they are on, while they discolor from exposure to the elements, time and nature pecking away at them. Their fate is tactile; feel free to touch them, but don’t think too much about how they relate to our own aging process, and that of the earth itself. “I try to find in my work as much as possible things that I cannot control,” Sodi told Time magazine in a 2013 interview. “What I ask of the viewer is to come with a completely empty mind. I try to avoid any kind of guidance to the viewer or hints.” The show is curated by Dakin Hart of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in Long Island City, who sees “Perfect Bodies” as “the past seeding itself into the present, a starting point for nature’s revenge.” Noguchi himself would be proud.