Isabelle Albuquerque

LOS ANGELES — For a few months in the spring of 2020, Isabelle Albuquerque tried to live like a deer. She spent time here at Griffith Park around dusk, watching as the animals emerged. She ate with them and like them, adopting their diet of only raw vegetables, fruits and nuts, including a lot of grass. Something like method acting, it was her way of preparing to create a sculpture merging her body and that of a deer, complete with hooves.

“It’s not easy to make figurative sculpture that’s fresh and new. It has been done since the dawn of art,” says Deitch. “It’s quite an achievement to have a new perspective, not just one but 10. She has a really deep vision.”

Born and based in Los Angeles, Albuquerque's practice spans music, explorations of the body, and self-portraiture, and the exhibition marks the first time she will collectively present the entire series of bodily sculptures she has created over the last four years as a collision between forms.

The phrase “Orgy for 10 People in One Body” — whose structure evokes a musical composition, like “Octet for Strings in E-flat Major” — is a reference to the late artist David Wojnarowicz’s 1990 mixed-media work I Feel a Vague Nausea, in which a passage of text details a secret wish to split into 10 people in order to give each of his loved ones a part of himself forever. “This was what I thought appropriate for all my desires and I never figured out how to rearrange it all,” Wojnarowicz wrote two years before he died of AIDS in 1992.

"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. 

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.

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.

Albuquerque's works, in their many mediums, are connected by a common thread of emotional intensity and piercing presence, with visuals that live in a space somewhere between intimate and provoking.