NYAB Event - Michael Stablein, Jr. “DESIRING SKINS”

Michael Stablein, Jr. “DESIRING SKINS”

Songs For Presidents

This event has ended.

Songs for Presidents presents DESIRING SKINS, an exhibition of new works by New York-based artist Michael Stablein, Jr. DESIRING SKINS is curated by Madeleine Zimmerman and is the last exhibition in Songs for Presidents’ Collect All Four series.

Michael Stablein, Jr. is an interdisciplinary artist from Houston, Texas. Through performance and video he utilizes the narratives of universal bodies and reflects on the internalization of cultural and individual relationships to inhabited bodies. DESIRING SKINS features videos from his latest installation of recorded performances.

Throughout multiple recordings, masked men perform on camera with phalluses tucked and taped. Devoid of the traditional signifiers of both masculinity and sexual virility – though seemingly maintaining both – the actions of and interactions between the figures become socially ambiguous. The interplay between aggression and sexuality exposes the ways in which men exercise violence to achieve intimacy and presents questions of how to develop intimacy without risking the loss of individual strength.

Paintball masks protect the men’s identities, lending them anonymity as they perform and contextualizing them within the securely male territory of war games and Jackass-style stunts as they transverse the gray areas of gender and sexuality.

Stablein appropriates Dynamic Tension (an early-twentieth-century system of resistance exercises pitting muscle against muscle) and a singular pose made prominent on social media by the BMX bike group KILLSHIT: SHOVELD!CK to sculpt and reveal masculinist tendencies/dependencies in the male body.

Juxtaposing “natural” space and “no” space, day and night, the human and the animal, this installation of videos occupies the space of overlap in these binarisms. DESIRING SKINS deploys the movements and narratives of presumed or pretend “universal bodies”, seeking out the point of confrontation between those supposed norms and the realities of internal otherness.

Camera: Walter Kmiec, Jude Flannelly
Sound/Light Production: Sam Gelband
Performance: George West Carruth, Michael Stablein, Jr.
Technology Consultant: Peter Clough