Reception: Thursday, Oct. 29 | 11 a.m.-1 p.m.
Leather’s typical—unremarkable. They’re animal skins, a byproduct of the meat industry. Yet it’s always mired in problems of context. Whether it’s football or leather harnesses, it’s encapsulated in pleasure, desire and power. An encounter with leather can be luxurious: a Birkin bag. It can be sexual: a dominatrix in a BDSM dungeon. It can be despicable: books made of human skin (or, purported to be). It can be controversial: protests of animal cruelty. It can be hypermasculine: a pigskin ball crushing a skull.
When attached to a human host, leather becomes a cunning sidekick. For destruction or construction is what follows: is it a tool of liberation, or domination? And what are the fringed edges that reveal a grunting grimace at its winking history? The work presented in Leather: A Problem of Context is about what could’ve been, should’ve been, or once was: but never fully materialized. Schwindt excavates and then conceals the legacies of leather, compressed into pleasantly claustrophobic figures and surfaces.
The exhibition is an epidermis, exposed and weathered, and showcases the history of a material often made contentious and convoluted.
Artist Website: samuelschwindt.xyz
