NEW YORK, NY.- Klaus Gallery presents Bodysnatchers, a group show featuring works by Karsen Heagle, Jenny Jisun Kim, Levani, Mónica Palma, and Robin Peck.

The 1955 Book “The Bodysnatchers” by Jack Finney, and its successive film adaptation(s), “Invasion of the Bodysnatchers” are often interpreted allegorically to reflect the anxieties of the Cold War era. In the story, alien spores replace citizens of a small town in California with “pod-people”—emotionless, sterile doppelgangers who if left unchecked would use up all resources and turn the earth into a dead planet before moving onto the next world. The plot has been seen as representing the threat of communism, McCarthyism and the “red scares”, and paranoia about societal collapse amid the threat of nuclear war. This show extends the themes in the story to current anxieties, including the loss of institutions and the rise of authoritarianism, political “othering” or erasing, ecological devastation, and the loss of due process amongst a broader erosion of rights.

Karsen Heagle’s paintings of scavengers such as vultures and hyenas tearing into animal flesh are inspired by “bestieries” from medieval manuscripts depicting fanged animals eating sinners. The inclusion of gold leafing gives the works a quasi-religious context, perhaps obliquely referring to spirituality, or structures of social subjugation.

Works by Jenny Jisun Kim, Untitled (Oxherding), are inspired by a series of Zen Buddhist poems and illustrations that tell the story of a young herder who undertakes a quest towards a spiritual awakening. The journey is depicted allegorically as the taming of an ox, culminating in the transcendence of both subject and object, and represented visually by an empty circle. While the original story resolves with the oxherder returning to society as a sage, Kim’s reinterpretation lingers in the terrain of pursuit, resistance, and dissolution, referenced through compositions using circles and abstraction.

Levani’s works bring together an interest in ancestral cosmologies, contemporary science, and activism with sculptural objects that can be used as flags, weapons, and ritualistic objects. The messages inscribed in English and Georgian are invocations, simultaneously political and poetic, aiming to inspire interconnectivity and empower the resistance.

Two videos by Mónica Palma capture works she performed in Mexico City and New York City, respectively. Both videos, filmed with an iphone, depict the engagement of her body with portals - putting her hand in holes in the pavement in Mexico, and in the other, physically licking the dings on the mirror-like metal walls of a subway car in NYC. The works relate to personhood and presence, healing and belonging, and transgressive behaviour in public spaces.

Formalist sculptures by Robin Peck suggest human heads that have been melted, weathered or eroded. The works are absurdist, minimal accumulations of matter, and the materials list indicates a successive build up of form from core to surface, i.e, lead, encased successively by iron, aluminium, steel, plaster, hydrocal, shellac, then wax.