Lick it to the Bone

“I like clay because you can squeeze it a lot and you can squeeze it some more,” Raquel Albarran Gonzalez said, a squishy wad of clay between her fingertips. For an artist whose primary pastimes include pinching people’s noses and toes, the tactile nature of clay is a natural instrument. For Lick it to the Bone, Raquel smushed herself deeper into the world of clay than ever before.

Raquel collaborated with ceramicist Josephine Noel, of Recreation Center, on a series of sculptural objects and oddities that blend domestic objects and bizarro fantasies. There are apple wedges and apple cores, toe flowers, and mugs that sprout snouts and ding-a-lings. The images are plucked from Raquel’s disgustingy-cute imagination, a fertile garden where tiered cakes and smoking donkeys run wild.

For the majority of her artistic career, Raquel has worked in two dimensions, creating big and juicy colored pencil drawings depicting a grab bag of spectacles both finger-licking and spine-tingling. A horse pregnant with alien offspring watches a deconstructed hamburger soar overhead like a flying saucer. An elephant with a bowler hat binges on Lay’s potato chips, a chili dog, and Poland spring water. The drawings are wormholes into Raquel’s deep desires and probing questions: what would it feel like to be impregnated by a pineapple? What would an eyeball cake taste like? Lick it to the Bone features 10 of Raquel’s recent 2D works, delving into her ongoing fascinations with illness, mortality, animal experimentation, and the tastiest of treats. 

Soon after Raquel and Josephine first met, Raquel became enraptured with Josephine’s large feet – women’s 10.5 to be exact – and her block toes. Before long, Josephine and her feet became Raquel’s trusted muses. The artists have since become collaborators and close friends. Since December, Raquel has spent Thursdays in Josephine’s Red Hook studio, learning how to adapt her 2D visions into 3D forms. Also, eating a lot of chicken wings. “The chicken wing is essential to our studio practice,” Josephine said.

Josephine mostly makes objects that you’d find in a kitchen and, well, not freak out. Mugs, vases, the occasional seder plate. When she teamed up with Raquel, they walked together into a newly formed space between fantasy and reality, function and freakiness.

“When Raquel came to my studio she was so fascinated with my work being functional,” Josephine said. “We’re making these fake objects — fake fruit, fake rats, fake flowers. All of her stuff is fake and my stuff is real and they live all together in the happy ever after.”

One of the show’s highlights is a rat with an impish grin. “The rat happened because I made an apple that was half eaten,” Raquel said. “Someone had to be eating the apple, who was it? Probably the rat. When you make a lot of things you get ideas for other things.” 

Raquel dubbed the process of creating the rat’s features one by one and fastening them together “doing surgery,” another lifelong dream achieved. “I carved out its brain, basically,” she said. “It’s going to be a brainless rat.” For the final touch, Raquel added a hole to her creation, per Josephine’s suggestion. “We gave it a butthole. So the air could come out.”

Lick it to the Bone will transform Summertime into a dinner party run amok, a mish-mash of real and unreal elements coming together to break bread and eat cake. Josephine’s classic dinnerware will mingle with Raquel’s toe flowers and hungry rodents. A detached optic nerve rolls onto a plate and now it’s what’s for dinner. 

What does Raquel’s imagination look like incarnated in this earthly plane? This was Josephine’s guiding question. Join us to see the answer come to life. Enjoy the apples and mind the rats.