LONG ISLAND CITY, NY.- to ignite our skin features newly commissioned and recent works from an international group of artists whose contributions, spanning sculpture, installation, photography, and architectural intervention, explore shedding as a condition of the body today, locating it as an act of transition, becoming, regeneration, and refusal.

Like a snake undergoing ecdysis or the peeling of a scab, the artworks embrace the image of replacing one’s own skin, with its opulent decay and raw vulnerability, navigating the uneasy tension between the intrinsic desire to evade capture through transformation and neoliberal-driven tech’s sinister demand for perpetual reinvention. Taking precarious sculpture as the departure point, the exhibition features works that are texturally layered and pieced together from a hybrid of materials weathered by or forged through the body: worn clothes, collected debris, scavenged organic matter, tattered construction material, remnants of military ware, or AI-generated—discarded, found, recovered, composed, and rewrought into embodiments of the in-between.

These works present a contrast to recent explorations of metamorphosis that idealize self-figuration—a trend that, perhaps unintentionally, feeds an insatiable capitalist desire to absorb and confine the corporeal self to detectable, marketable, and ossified forms. The exhibition’s artists persistently refute this impulse. Instead, through a sensuous ferocity, they shape unyielding configurations of forms that unravel, decay, morph, and reconstitute themselves into new iterations.

Participating artists include Patricia Ayres, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Sarah Friend, Mire Lee, Umico Niwa, Mimi Park, Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos, Sofía Sinibaldi, Erik Tlaseca, and Yu Ji.

to ignite our skin is curated by Jovanna Venegas, Curator.