Nalani Stolz: Bodies Still Becoming

The Sculpture Center

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• Date Friday, February 23, 2024 - Saturday, April 13, 2024
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Update: The Sculpture Center has relocated its galleries and offices to 12210 Euclid Avenue and will re-open in November. Founded in 1989, The Sculpture Center is one of the only cultural institutions providing critical resources to sculptors along their journey.... more

The bodies Nalani Stolz crafts bulge, grow and break down. Their holes and orifices slowly release and leak. Their taut skin stretches and pulls; leaving soft lines across their surfaces. Through her work, she grapples with how it feels to inhabit our bodies as ever-shifting forms. Exploring the ways they hold together all the mushy, heavy, fragile pieces.

By utilizing materials gleaned from the domestic skills of her mother, the labor and tenderness of these daily tasks are passed from her mother’s body to Stolz’s own. Through creating sculptural forms, Stolz reclaims these materials and processes. Observing rising dough to explore expansion and constriction, allowing cloth sculptures to leak and ooze, filling fermented membranes and porous clay bodies with vinegar that seeps out, growing warts and bumps across their surfaces.

The bodily processes in the work draw on the often-gendered experiences of weeping, menstruation, miscarriage, abortion, and pregnancy. Each work continually shifting throughout the exhibition to convey slow processes of change or disintegration. Through material surrogates each work gives form to the ways our body takes in and expels matter; the feelings of expansion and fullness and those of emptying out, of breaking down. The way these moments shift our seemingly solid edges and reveal our porous boundaries; reminding us that we are dying, changing, decaying vessels, loosely contained by skin, muscle, and bone.