Siobhan Liddell and Linda Matalon “Fragments”

Candice Madey

This event has ended.

Curated by Ksenia M. Soboleva

CANDICE MADEY presents Fragments, presenting works by Siobhan Liddell and Linda Matalon spanning the 1990s through 2010s. The exhibition traces the ways in which the AIDS crisis resonates in the artistic practices of lesbian identified artists.

While the last decade has witnessed an increased interest in art of the AIDS crisis and queer identity, lesbian artists remain largely unnoticed participants in art historical narratives on this topic. Even when evoked as fellow activists and caregivers, their artistic production is rarely considered in the context of the epidemic, a period marked by mass death, increased homophobia, and a neglectful government that allowed for the (still ongoing) health crisis to escalate. As artistic responses that directly conveyed the political dimension of the AIDS crisis were encouraged and praised, particularly by the renowned art historian Douglas Crimp, less attention was paid to artists whose works could not legibly qualify as AIDS activism. This is especially true for those who responded and reflected through subtle registers, abstract forms, and quiet metaphors.
Siobhan Liddell and Linda Matalon are two such artists, fragments of a much larger narrative thread to which this curator has dedicated years of doctoral study. Their work shares a poetic sensibility imbued with the understanding that time is a shrinking body, capricious and cruel without exception, while endlessly seductive. Coming of age during the AIDS crisis in New York, Liddell and Matalon moved in the same circles, shared many friends, and crossed paths on several occasions, yet their work has never been paired until now. Working across different media, including sculpture, drawing, photography, and collage, the artists draw out a simultaneous lightness and weight from the materials at hand. Their work grapples with the body as a fragile structure, both physically and spiritually affected by the process of loss and its ramifications.
-Ksenia M. Soboleva