NEW YORK, NY.- Invisible-Exports is presenting “Soft Core,” a bifocal group show arranged around soft sculpture and its not entirely semantic relationship to softcore imagery.

What’s the quiddity of softness—what quality is shared by materials that give to the touch, images out of focus, pornography that doesn’t show penetration, intimate composition, colors on the bluer end of the spectrum, plush luxury, empathy and unprocessed romanticism, as in “soft-focus”? What makes soft soft?

“Soft Core” was conceived and curated to explore bodiliness as the mercurial element of form underlying softness of all kinds—a quality which endows work with a shape-shifting, sensual flesh-like materiality that can both exceed, and be hemmed in by, composition. Even in work which does not depict flesh or fleshliness in any explicit way, softness of form invariably produces a bodily effect or experience in encountering the work; even softcore pornographic imagery paradoxically more ‘bodily,’ more fleshly and inviting, than often-mechanical hard-core material.

The exhibition highlights three-dimensional sculpture featuring soft materials and two-dimension wall-based work built from softcore imagery, or pornographic imagery altered so as to render it “soft.” The juxtaposition blurs the line that separates abstract materiality and semi-explicit imagery, where the softness begins to feel sensual, and the sexual can almost be truly felt.

SOFT CORE | Josh Blackwell, Anne Doran, Andrew Guenther, Dave Hardy, Karen Heagle, Christian Holstad, Stephen Irwin, Linder, William J. O’Brien, Suzannah Sinclair, Adam Parker Smith, Naomi Uman, Pinar Yolacan, and Jade Yumang