Complicated Tension: Artist Chris Curreri Conveys Attraction, Repulsion, Vulnerability, and Power with New Exhibition at Contemporary Calgary

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Chris Curreri’s new exhibit at Contemporary Calgary features a haunting figure who appears to be sulking in a corner. Called Christopher, he is a self-portrait of the artist and a life-size hand puppet standing with his head leaning against the wall.

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When asked why Christopher has his back to the viewer, Curreri seems reluctant at first to answer.

“I guess he’s… being punished a little bit,” says the Toronto artist. “But don’t make me talk too much about it.”

In fact, Curreri seems a bit reluctant in general to discuss the sexual undertones of That, There, It, a multidisciplinary exhibition that mixes photography and figurative sculpture and covers more than a decade of the artist’s work. Some of the pieces are intended to represent a “way of talking about power and vulnerability”.

The first piece a visitor to Contemporary Calgary’s Ring Gallery is likely to encounter is The Thing, a collaboration with Curreri’s partner and fellow artist Luis Jacob. The silicone sculpture is based on a photograph they both created of a man on his hands and knees. In the life-size sculpt, every part of the figure’s body is hermetically sealed under a skin-tight black cover that looks like BDSM fetish gear. The large-scale installation, Self-Portrait with Luis Jacob, was just completed this year and features two life-size figures encased in a mirrored cube lit from within. It is based on a 1973 photograph by Toronto artist Rodney Werden titled Self-Portrait with Jorge Zontal. Both Werden and Zontal were fixtures in Toronto’s underground art scene in the 1970s. The image showed the photographer sitting in a chair and Zontal covering his eyes as he stood behind him with an old-fashioned camera. Curreri again used himself and Jacob as models for the piece, with him taking over the role of Werden. Bloom, the photograph used as the main visual to market That, There, Is, shows the face of a man (Curreri again, presumably) obscured or perhaps consumed by a burst bubble of gum.

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“The porosity of bodies as a metaphor (is) a theme that runs through the entire work and also the absence of porosity: What does it mean to meet a body that cannot see you or that you cannot touch or that you cannot? not even? he asks.

“I think all the pieces are related in some way,” he adds. “For me, most of the works have something to do with using this idea of ​​bodily porosity as a way of speaking or pointing out the ways we are in relation to others. These include states of power and vulnerability. For example, I made a puppet of myself. It is the idea that you manifest yourself in the world, you make yourself present in the world, speaking. But also the world affects you when you are here. The idea of ​​the hand puppet waiting to be animated speaks to that. Alternatively, (Bloom), the image used for the show, shows another state where something inside the body is captured through the gum. The bubble enters the outer space of the body.

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Curreri studied art and photography at Ryerson University and the Ontario College of Art and Design before receiving her MFA in photography from Bard College in New York. In 2015, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, which is Canada’s highest award for emerging artists. He has participated in several international group shows and produced solo shows across Canada, including last year’s Thick Skull, Thin Skin at the Esker Foundation in Calgary.

Whatever the thematic threads, it’s safe to say that one of the hallmarks of Curreri’s work is that it is provocative. His Kiss Portfolio, for example, is a series of close-up photos of two men kissing. However, this is not obvious from looking at them, and as the accompanying text suggests, “viewers are tempted” to see much more intimate poses and body parts than are actually shown. In another series of photographs dubbed August 17, 2021, there are close-ups of an old bicycle fused with or slowly consumed by a tree.

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“I photographed it at night with a flash,” says Curreri. “I wanted that kind of forensic feel. I think what the flash does is give it a kind of freezing of the incomprehensible, or an absorption.”

Perhaps the most provocative pieces in the exhibition are titled Insomniac, which are color photographs showing animal entrails draped over mundane objects or artfully hung. They seem to fall safely into both the realm of David Cronenberg-esque body horror movies and the territory of acquired taste, but Curreri insists there’s a beauty to them, too.

“The palette is so beautiful,” he says. “They almost look like blown glass. But I think there’s this tension where people are drawn to the palette or the shape and there’s something tricky about objectifying this death. There is a kind of attraction, repulsion.

Chris Curreri: That, There, It is available through September 18 at Contemporary Calgary.