NYAB Event - Rebecca Goyette “Sausage Party Bride”

Rebecca Goyette “Sausage Party Bride”

Arts + Leisure

[Image: Rebecca Goyette "Bun in the Oven Bride" (2010) Hand-built ceramic sculpture with mixed media, 10 x 8 x 20 in.]

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Rebecca Goyette has created a hybrid, multimedia practice including video, performance, sculpture and 2-D work which explores the humor of sexuality and human nature through art. For Goyette, sex is a gateway into the rich territory of psychology and human interaction. Her schematic Lobsta Porn video series explores sexual fantasy scenarios through people playacting the magical sex lives of lobsters. Her latest project Sausage Party Bride, now on view at Arts+Leisure in East Harlem continues the exploration of eroticism and humor through ceramics. The show welcomes you into Goyette’s pervy living room, replete with a penis rock garden, a curio cabinet of various debauched puritans, framed ceramic plaques that look like they are from an x-rated Scooby Doo episode, ceramic dildos, a penis pirate ship, and wedding cake toppers.

The inner layers of Goyette’s work deal with positive and negative emotions related to sex: ecstasy, self-love, love of the “other,” shyness and bravado, vulnerability and power, and alienation. The ceramic sculptures play with both interior and exterior space. The exhibition is titled after Goyette’s artwork Sausage Party Bride: its interior is a dollhouse rendition of a typical suburban basement mancave: including a pool table, beer signs and a cast of drunken sausage characters. The sculpture suggests that this woman’s fate is built in, that her life is one of both restraint and servitude to a fraternal, male-dominated world - she is a middle American housewife. Goyette both satirizes and challenges this notion and exuberantly calls for a release of sexual repression and domination.

Goyette’s sculptures wickedly poke fun at the realities of modern relationships. The titles say it all: Bun-in-the-Oven Bride, Hidden Pleasures Bride and Nothing-to-Hide Groom, Cowboy Groom, Piggy Bank Bride and Megabucks Groom, Junk Food Bride, Fertility Bride, Party On! Bride, Witch Bride, Condominium Bride, Horsies and Butterflies Bride. The ceramics in the series all poke at and or play with puritanical notions of intimacy and rigidity. Goyette builds her women with hidden dildos inside. They are prepared to liberate themselves from the bondage of being “good women.” Both artist and her subjects appear to say - Hey, let’s get loose and kinky.

Nothing is really as it appears on the surface. Goyette has created a world which exposes the fragility of the modern day relationship; she points out its rigidity in her choice of material, and also reveals what’s going on underneath. She suggests ritual, witchcraft, exorcism along with tantric acts and release. Perhaps Goyette is playing the holy fool, using ceramic objects to suggest that old paradigms don’t work: puritanical rigidity and fragility be damned.

Rebecca Goyette received a BFA from RISD and an MFA from SVA. She has exhibited widely in NYC and internationally, including solo projects at Freight+Volume, NYC, Airplane Gallery, NYC, NY Studio Gallery, NYC, Jersey City Museum, Jersey City, NJ and Galerie X, Istanbul, Turkey. She completed residencies at DNA Summer Residency, Provincetown, MA, Offshore Project, Kardamyli, Greece, Greenwich House Pottery, NYC and Byrdcliffe in Woodstock, NY.