Isabelle Albuquerque
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy for 10 People in One Body: 5, 2020
flocked resin, ebony Gaboon, wedding ring
20 x 24 x 48 in
50.8 x 61 x 122 cm
Ed. 1/3
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy for 10 People in One Body: 5, 2020
(detail view)
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy for 10 People in One Body: 5, 2020
(detail view)
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy for 10 People in One Body: 6, 2020
resin, mica-laced Lexus auto body paint
18 x 18 x 65 in
45.7 x 45.7 x 165.1 cm
Ed. 1/3
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy for 10 People in One Body: 6, 2020
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy for 10 People in One Body: 6, 2020
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy for 10 People in One Body: 6, 2020
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy for 10 People in One Body: 6, 2020
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy for 10 People in One Body: 6, 2020
(detail view)
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 3, 2020
walnut
30.4 x 8.5 x 5.85 in
77.3 x 21.6 x 14.8 cm
Ed. 1/3
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 3, 2020
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 3, 2020
(detail view)
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 3, 2020
(detail view)
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 3, 2020
(scale view)
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 4, 2020
rubber
22 x 22 x 43 in
55.9 x 55.9 x 109.2 cm
Ed. 1/3
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 4, 2020
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 4, 2020
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 4, 2020
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 4, 2020
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 4, 2020
(detail view)
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 1, 2019
cast bronze and saxophone
42 x 40 x 80 in
106.7 x 101.5 x 203 cm
Ed. 1/3
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 1, 2019
(detail view)
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 1, 2019
(detail view)
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 1, 2019
(detail view)
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 1, 2019
(detail view)
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 2, 2020
cast resin, mattress, candle
38.8 x 38 x 75 in
98.5 x 96.5 x 190.5 cm
Ed. 2/3
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 2, 2020
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 2, 2020
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 2, 2020
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 2, 2020
(detail view)
Isabelle Albuquerque
Orgy For Ten People In One Body: 2, 2020
(detail view)
“Inside my head I wished for years that I could separate into ten different people to give each person I loved a part of myself forever and also have some left over to drift across landscapes and maybe even go into death or areas that were deadly and have enough of me to survive the death of one or two of me—this was what I thought appropriate for all my desires and I never figured out how to rearrange it all and now I’m in danger of losing the only one of me that is around.” — David Wojnarowicz, In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz
Isabelle Albuquerque is a dancer. Articulate in movement, she contorts her body into visual expressions of fleeting yet unforgettable waves of emotion, perfect in the moment, then gone. The body, to Albuquerque, is a porous vessel for empathy and individual emotion. It soaks in its surroundings through osmosis—a fight with a lover, a brush with the sublime, a crying child, an uncomfortably wet sock on a frigid evening—and fills itself with experience, only to gradually let these moments slip away again in some form, often unrecognizable to the body itself. Each fluctuation of the elbow is a forgotten memory reasserting itself, each curl of the toes is a past life searching for a new home.
Orgy for 10 People in One Body, the series from which Sextet, Albuquerque’s first solo exhibition is culled, is her attempt to freeze the escape of these unsolvable gestures, these reconfigurations of past experience indefinitely, yet allow them to remain open to currently inaccessible and incalculable contacts and understandings.
In Sextet, six headless casts of Albuquerque’s body stand, recline, embalm, and birth themselves throughout the gallery. They populate and dominate the space like a self-possessed army, each figure announcing herself in formation: 1 is a musical adaptation of the rape or seduction of the artist casting herself as Leda from Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan”; 2 is a perpetual birth and first motherhood by fire, an ourbouros of elemental initiations; 3 is diminutive in stature, yet possesses the ecstatic and orgasmic gravity of the sun within her solid walnut form; 4 perches herself on all fours, both fiercely on-guard and prone for a rear mounting; 5 is the artist as a doe on a pillow of grass, her cloven hooves singing of the surfaces and souls with which they’ve made contact; 6 is a sarcophagus-as-elegy for the shapes and spirits she once possessed and those she will become. They do not diminish the artist’s presence through the separation of self, they amplify it, increasing her empathetic interior and surface area, so that we all become instrumental in her symphony of unsolvable gestures.
Isabelle Albuquerque is a Los Angeles-based sculptor and performer. She was a founding member of the music and performance duo Hecuba, and is a co-director of Osk, a collaborative studio that develops artificial and alien intelligence to create and look at art and individual experience through new human and nonhuman perspectives. Orgy for 10 People in One Body, Albuquerque's current sculptural journey, involves casting and 3D scanning her own body to create ten headless, human-scaled figures, each composed of a different solitary material. Pieces from the series have been highlighted in Nicodim’s group exhibitions When You Waked Up the Buffalo (2020), Skin Stealers (2019), and Hollywood Babylon: A Re-Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (2020), presented in collaboration with Jeffrey Deitch and AUTRE Magazine. Albuquerque is featured in conversation with Arthur Jafa in AUTRE Magazine’s current issue, The Edge of Chaos. Sextet is her first solo exhibition with the gallery.
"Each sculpture is a performance of a different idea or set of ideas. Before beginning the fabrication of each piece, I work like a Butoh or Vogue dancer for many months searching for and rehearsing a particular form. I call this the “drawing” phase and it also includes a lot of self portraiture through photography . In this phase, I am looking for an unsolvable gesture." – Isabelle Albuquerque
In this interview with Nika Chewich and Sara Frier, Los Angeles-based artist Isabelle Albuquerque mines the vast pyschosexual resources of her subconscious ancient mythos and art history for her deeply intimate sculptural odyssey: Orgy for 10 People in One Body.
I wanted to create something that was not in response to the male gaze. These works are from a matriarchal, mythological, and internal lineage. They’re coming from the gaze that emanates from inside the body and are less concerned with the gaze that looks onto the body.
All fantasy, all good theater, requires some suspension of disbelief, a surrender to the moment. Total acceptance of what lies before us is what gives works of art their undeniable power. Isabelle Albuquerque’s work induces that suspension of disbelief, conjuring meaning from metaphor, innuendo, and metamorphosis. All of these phenomena come to the fore in a series of figures that manipulate and reconfigure reality.
"I think a lot of times throughout art history, especially with women’s bodies, the desire is projected onto the object or body, but I’m really interested in the kind of desire that projects outwards from inside the body. I think this is related to what some medieval saints and mystics referred to as the inner eye. I love all gazes, I’m not against the male gaze, but this particular emanation of desire is not about that, it’s a different kind of gaze that comes from within. It’s a gaze that’s mythological, matriarchal, and personal. It’s a gaze that reaches from inside and directs itself outward."
Headless and naked, standing up or lying down, on all fours or spread-eagled, all of these works were incarnations of an orgiastic multitude... Albuquerque’s avatars, though humorous, are nonetheless tinged by a real violence that seems to be perpetually lurking in the shadows. After careers as a dancer, musician, and designer, the artist—in her solo debut as a visual artist—offers up a compelling meditation on the nature of being, the possibilities of pleasure, and the difficult process of trying to understand the throngs, lost and found, who inhabit every single one of us.
Each piece in the show is exciting, gorgeous and worthy of the unhurried, spiritual attention one would pay at an altar. Albuquerque presents headless totems of feelings, not imprisoned in memory, or choked by the ego’s self-consciousness, but poised, reclining, spread on all fours, ready for the full experience.
With hyperreal sculptures made from headless casts of the artist, the show explored the fleeting and embodied natures of emotion, sexuality and social experience.
Purple presents images by Dana Boulos of Sextet, Isabelle Albuquerque’s first solo exhibition with Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles.
Seated across from me in her lofted MacArthur Park studio on a swampy summer Sunday in late August, Isabelle Albuquerque wears a black ball cap emblazoned with the slogan: “When Attitude Becomes Form.” It might as well be the mantra for her rocket-fueled sculpture practice, which only began in earnest a year ago, but will be the subject of a solo debut, Sextet, now open at downtown’s ascendant Nicodim Gallery.
They say a dancer’s instrument is their body. But when a movement artist moves into the world of sculpture, that can become truer than ever. Isabelle Albuquerque is on that journey now, transmogrifying her background in performance, music, and artificial intelligence/tech into dimensional objects that in a sense, continue to perform.
In the Spring/Summer 2020 Issue of AUTRE, Arthur Jafa and Isabelle Albuquerque discuss Black culture, bad whiteness, and why the edge is bleeding. Other topics of conversation include Jafa's "Love is the Message, the Message is Death" (2016), scored by Kanye West, and Jafa's follow-up project The White Album (2018), as well as Isabelle Albuquerque's matriachal upbringing and sculptural developments.