NICKI GREEN: Eye of the Fountain
September 6 - November 16, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, September 6, 6 - 8 p.m.
Artist Talk with Damon R. Young: Saturday, September 7 at 1 p.m.
CULT Aimee Friberg is delighted to present Eye of the Fountain, a solo exhibition by long time Bay Area former resident and currently New York-based artist Nicki Green. The exhibition will be on view from September 6 through November 16, 2024, at CULT’s San Francisco location, 1401 16th Street. The opening reception will take place on Friday, September 6, from 6 to 8 p.m; and an artist talk will take place on Saturday, September 7 at 1 p.m.
Eye of the Fountain offers an intricate exploration of queer and trans embodiment, sacred ritual, semiotic coding, and movement through a collection of new and recent ceramic sculptures, and drawings. Drawing inspiration from Hal Fischer’s Gay Semiotics: A Photographic Study of Visual Coding Among Homosexual Men (1977), Green’s sculptures of figures and vessels explore how bodies are perceived while actively signaling their queerness through a coded, visual and embodied language. Adding further layers of meaning, the exhibition juxtaposes traditional ceremony, such as the Jewish ritual bath mikveh (which has historically excluded queer and trans individuals) with contemporary, secular images of trans embodiment (including stills from pop music video choreography). This fusion challenges the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, positioning the trans body as divine.
The exhibition is centered around two human scale ceramic figures Eye of the Fountain (2022) and Knot Thick (2022), partaking in, and facilitating, a mikveh. Green engages the architecture of the gallery to evoke a site of ritual cleansing and immersion. Green has a long-standing fascination with the mikveh, and the ways in which trans Jews have been utilizing this ritual as a liminal space to mark, affirm and engage a body in transition. The figurative, life-size sculptures greet the viewer upon entry, creating a blurring of boundaries whereby the physical gallery becomes ritual space (mikveh site) and ritual object (purification vessel) simultaneously.
For Green, clay is the ideal medium for its malleability and transmutational capacities. In a related manner, Green has long incorporated and depicted mycelium and fungi in her work, comparing their porosity, emergent or replication practices, and web-like rooted networks of support to facets of trans identity, modes of care, and resilience. Green’s mushrooms are rendered as sensuous and fecund. The organic forms surround and envelop vessels, offering an untidy voluptuous blanketing to these repurposed functional objects used for washing ritual and for fermentation.
Green’s Hybrid Vessel series is an ongoing body of work in which tin-glazed earthenware surface paintings are contrasted against organic fungus-like forms. Tin-glazed earthenware, a surface painting technique originating in 9th century Iraq, and simultaneously as Chinese cobalt-on-porcelain wares in the Tang Dynasty, became popularized in Europe in 17th to 19th century. The histories of this craft invoke not only explorations of the historical development of religious ceramics, but also the ways in which appropriation, inspiration and mimesis intersect with the aesthetic evolution of material and cultural production. Green uses the contrasting purple/white palette to both reference and eschew traditional illustration and decoration commonly found in these surface painting traditions. She has developed her own language of haptics and mark-making rendered on the surface, with a pattern she refers to as a "hexagram lattice" alongside an indexing of religious, queer and trans symbols and gestures.
In Hybrid Vessel 3 (with mishkan and trans semiotics, blue/green), Hybrid Vessel 4 (with trans semiotics, pink/yellow), and Hybrid Vessel 5 (with trans semiotics, green/yellow), all from 2023, Green depicts a nude figure visible from the waist up performing gestures derived from trans pop music choreography on the surface of the earthenware. The figure touches their cheek, then looks at their finger, and traces lines from their shoulder across their breastplate. Green sees these gestures as studies in trans anatomy, or recorded gestures of transness. In the several Trans Semiotics wall-hanging sculptures, Green further references the queer gestural signaling with sculpted hands articulating dipping pinkies, interlocking digits, a limp wrist, and two fingers pinching a sprig of lavender. These visual cues and indexing of gestures are important acts of embodiment and honor the universal need to see and be seen.
The exhibition thematically aligns with the artist’s concurrent show Nicki Green: Firmament at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) in San Francisco, opening on Thursday, September 5, 2024 and running through February 2, 2025. There, Green explores the concept of the firmament, described in the Book of Genesis as a thin veil or dome separating the earth from the heavens. This form of separation in the Torah offers Green a reference to imagine the diasporic architectural tabernacle as a site for in-betweenness and an environment of warmth, welcome and liberation for trans and non-binary bodies. Eye of the Fountain complements this with a focus on the downward expanse—the body entering the Mikveh—puncturing the surface of the water, as the firmament is the upward-facing boundary between heaven and earth: this completed, circular relationship between body-nature-spirit and the divine highlights the interconnectedness of all existence and the fluidity of human experience.
Says Green in her statement about the new work, "Trans embodiment and trans materiality offer us ways in which we can understand ourselves connected to other people and other organisms in the world. Just as the mycellial network (the largest living organism on earth) which connects fungi to other organisms like trees, creates a reciprocal framework of exchanging nutrients, a divine trans embodiment positions this fluidity and interconnectedness as holy. It allows us to explore the ways in which it is not only morally important to act in solidarity across difference, it is sacred to do so."
The opening reception on September 6 will provide an opportunity to engage with Green’s transformative work with the artist in person.
Artist Talk on September 7– Writer and theorist Damon R Young will join Green for an artist talk on Saturday, September 7 at 1 p.m. Young is associate professor of Film & Media and French at University of California, Berkeley. He teaches courses on art cinema, on sexuality and media, and on topics in digital media and film theory. His first book, Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies (Duke) was 2019 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize, and his current project, Century of the Selfie: Irony and Eros in Networked Media, is forthcoming with Harvard University Press.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Nicki Green is a transdisciplinary artist working primarily in clay. Her sculptures, ritual objects and various flat works explore topics of history preservation, conceptual ornamentation and aesthetics of otherness. Green has exhibited internationally, including at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC; La Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France; the New Museum, New York; and Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, France. Green is a 2022 Tiffany Foundation Award Winner, a 2022 Nancy Graves Foundation Grantee, and a 2020 ART MATTERS fellow. She received a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute (2009) and an MFA from UC Berkeley (2018). She is an Assistant Professor of Ceramics at Alfred University.
