Vital Signs

Vital Signs looks closely at how abstraction is often intimately tied with expansive, fluid ideas of the bodily. Bringing together seemingly unalike categories—masculine/feminine, figurative/abstract, self/other, exotic/banal—into newly fused configurations, the publication shows how artists have often conceived of these categories as inextricably intertwined. With a focus on artists working in the 1960s and 70s who, with a few exceptions, identified as women, the catalogue is divided into three thematic sections. 'Mirror' explores the ways artists have honed in on the forms of the face and head as a distorted mirror; 'Matter' looks at how artists draw on the metaphorical resonances of the body in ways that suggest mutable morphologies, especially in relation to socially constructed definitions of gender, race, and sexuality; and 'Metamorphosis' examines how artists have used abstraction as a means to transform the human body into different modes of being: new identities, other animals, and spiritual or cosmological entities. An introductory essay Lanka Tattersall maps the historical precedents from a feminist and queer art historical perspective, while a prologue by poet and artist Precious Okoyomon and a focused meditation by Lambda Literary Award finalist Cyrus Grace Dunham open up new forms of language for questions around gender and abstraction.