Ilana Savdie “Loose Bodies”

VACATION

This event has ended.

Ilana Savdie’s new series of paintings distort, disjoint and reconfigure fragmented bodies into amoebic forms. These are bodies under siege, integrity moldering under steady pressure and sudden impacts. This view of sinew is not horrific, but clinical, context for review not recoil. Their limbs traverse spatial and temporal constraints, flailing outward in a churn of collateral damage. Her figures shapeshift physically, cow pig flamingo frames released from the burden of bones, from the freight of their pre-ordained meaning. Mammals floating in canvas amnion.

Loose bodies are fragments of bone and cartilage knocked free by an impact leaving subcutaneous floating particles. These unbound parts generate shifts in balance, displacing the equilibrium of power and dependence. In these spaces is where we take a closer look, where the synecdoche reveals a truth. The impact we can’t see, only feel in our bones. Bones as carriage, bones as profundity, where the impact happens, the real knowing.

Major portions of the picture plane are left in reserve, left bare. A shade pulled down revealing the nothing taking place outside. Chaos for the Greeks was a vast chasm, a void. A mouth wavering, coming to terms with the space through which vibrations race out. A void that wavers is a delicacy.

Hard edges and repetitive strokes define the canvas as the operating theater. Curtains of flesh opened calmly, marks pacing in metronomic strides, slack-boned organ boundaries. With grotesque moments juxtaposed, subjects formed by senseless impacts. a steady hand makes incisions.

Ilana Savdie (b. 1986, Miami, FL) lives and works in New York. She received her MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2018. This is her second exhibition with ltd los angeles, and first solo presentation with the gallery.