Transmogrification NOW! September 7th - October 6th 2024
Swivel Gallery, New York, NY
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Swivel Gallery is pleased to present, “TransmogrificationNOW!”, a dynamic solo exhibition by Amy Bravo featuring a series of new sculptural works, paintings, and installation opening September 7th at 350 Hudson Street. Bravo’s latest works merges cabinets, curios, and furniture with eerie and nostalgic elements such as bones, relics, and a multitude of media offering a unique exploration of Cuban mythology and personal narrative. Central to the exhibition are Bravo’s “Automaton” sculpture series, where repurposed antique furniture is manipulated and collaged into totemic creatures. “Transmogrification NOW!” is a deep dive into a coming of age tale of a generation that seeks to find its place in our complex world, at once seeking individuality while navigating how to continue legacies left behind by their elders.
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in the weaver’s room, the inheritance is kept behind glass. the weaver inventories with eight hands–her legs, her hair, her bones, the future, her teeth, her thread, the future, her gloves, the future, her sword, the future, her night and her net and her web and the future. the weaver counts and notates, counts again and preserves. the inheritance is tucked into drawers. locked in cabinets. caught wriggling, pin-pricked, wrapped in silk, placed back in its perfect cage where the weaver cannot taste it.
the weaver’s room has a locked blue door and no key. the weaver puts her face in a cabinet and is pleased when it learns how to speak.
the room has a locked blue door and no key so the bull gores her window until it cracks, skull on the pane igniting spokes of glass, spires branching away from the contact in a web of shards. bisected, clipped, stitched, divined, disfigured–pins protruding from her thorax. she is careful to move slowly. the weaver’s room is a sword box and she is unwilling to be gutted. the weaver hangs her heart from a chain and is pleased when she begins to breathe like a machine. the bull gores its way inside the weaver’s room and the cupboards tremble and the old rooster cries and crows and croons from his place on the sill. the weaver has eight legs and so she is tall enough, fast enough, nimble enough to ascend. she looks down upon her inheritance and works a new web. the weaver says i won’t leave you and doesn’t feel bad for lying. the bull can only hear the outline of her words, flat and soundless as a pencil to the page. she’s carrying the rooster wrapped in silk, half-blind, demented by time, so shriveled that he’s light as a fly. they ride on the back of a snake. they slither over glass. she stakes the rooster’s bone-light body on her sword and lays him across her shoulder, where he’s safe from the wind.
she says i won’t leave you but she’s far away and hungry, and she can taste dust in the pads of her fingers, the world outside the room sepia and eternal, like a dream she had, she says like a dream i had, like i can’t let go, like i see you there in the mirror and i am there, there where i’m not.
the weaver is far away with a bull in her room.
she says
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oh god! i’m turning out like you. what a nightmare. to trace my life inside your silhouette, to know exactly where the edges are. i am trying to get ahead
of the situation. there is nothing really wrong with you. nothing wrong with any one of us at all really. but i’m not supposed to live any other person’s life. but i am going to. of course. i’m going to live all of yours at once. together. i am the amalgamation of you all. i am the point at which we’ve arrived. i am your femur, her nose, his ear, your gut. i am rearranged and cobbled. i walk knock kneed and side-forward, i drag one arm on the ground. i smile with a few teeth from each of you. but still i’m smiling, still im walking. i’m braiding all of your paths. i am stepping where you stepped. i am jumping from one footprint to another, from his path to hers, from yours to theirs. i create desire lines between them. soon our paths are spokes of a web, and i pull bands of horizontal silk across. and soon it is a living thing itself, the things you lived. it is a country i move through. this is my land— i plant a flag. i make my home. i’m going to live here. right here, in your lives.
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AWAKE
ALIVE!
THE AUTOMATON SPRINGS UP FULLY FORMED LIKE A DAUGHTER
LIKE A NIGHT MOVER R R RR
i am learning new tricks.
Text by Mallory Pearson
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