FOOTNOTE

Footnote
December 13, 2019 - March 9, 2020
Opening Reception: Friday, December 13, 6-8pm

Summertime is pleased to present Footnote, an exhibition about extremities.

Our hands and feet extend out from the core of our bodies and into the world, making first contact with the people and places that define our lives. We reach out to others as a means of introduction, to gauge something’s temperature or texture, and to perform the most loving or mundane tasks of human existence. Our feet—the subject of both folklore and fetish—ground us within our environments and guide us both to and around each other. The palms we extend to strangers are sometimes believed to bear maps of our lives, both past and future, while the soles of our feet are said to provide insight into the interiors of our bodies. 

The stories we tell about our extremities are evident in artistic representation throughout the ages. The history of art is filled with portraits in which a disembodied hand serves as surrogate for the work’s subject. Feet gesture towards symbols of prosperity, luck, mourning and sex. The works in Footnote inevitably evoke the layered meanings we attach to these appendages, but also encourage us to think beyond conventional paradigms. Misleidys Pedroso’s cut-and-taped paper foot and Hope Esser’s clear acrylic hand remind us of the bodies they were once attached to. Austin Furtak-Cole’s fleshy tableaus and Aurie Ramirez’s anthropomorphic nail art underscore the tacit ways our appendages frequently do a lot of the talking. Raina Hamner’s ominous hands rain down from the sky and yank us into the abyss. Grotesque or gothic, amputated or augmented, the hands and feet on display within Footnote present tactile experience as an idiosyncratic and nuanced form of knowledge—one that not only connects our bodies to our environment and to others, but which also allows us to imagine bodies, and the environments they inhabit, otherwise. 

Footnote features works by Raquel Albarran, Hope Esser, Austin Furtak-Cole, Raina Hamner, Camille Holvoet, Sophie Larrimore, Misleidys Francisca Castillo Pedroso, and Aurie Ramirez. The exhibition was on view from December 13, 2019 to March 9, 2020 at Summertime 145 Ainslie Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211. 

Image: Misleidys Francisca Castillo Pedroso, Untitled, 2010, Gouache on paper, 11 x 17 inches