GROUP EXHIBITION

Finger Bang, curated by sculptor Genesis Belanger and painter GaHee Park, surveys the work of 22 living artists who depict fingersand hands to various ends and effects. The results are wide-rangingbut all can agree that the hand remains an area to be mined forpsychological, sexual, and political meanings. Much of the work in theexhibition is of a surrealist bent and, in keeping with that, bodily imagery pervades. Fingers and hands appear where they shouldn’t be, often severed or separate from their host body.

A popular reading of the dismembered and distorted bodies strewn about the great works of classical Surrealism is that this imageryplayed out as a reaction to the horrors of World War I. A more Freudiantake on this diagnosed a latent impulse towards violence (oftendirected at women). Some of the work in Finger Bang does engagecomparable traumas but the way it deals with the body is the productof much more contemporary impulses and behaviours: it grew up oncut-and-paste, it deploys Postmodern samplings and relishes inradical decontextualisation. Very often the effect is darkly humorous,inciting knowing laughter and discomfort in equal measure.

Across all the work here, the body keeps cropping up – fragmented and unruly, a thing to be kept in check. Many of the artists are grapplingwith flesh in a world that is increasingly hostile towards having a bodythat is truly one’s own – autonomous, desirous, expressive. In this way,Finger Bang grasps our contemporary moment.

Curators Genesis Belanger (b. 1978) and GaHee Park (b. 1985) briefly overlapped at Hunter College’s MFA program in the twenty-teens. Eachremembers encountering, and admiring, the other’s work beforeeventually forming a great friendship born of the synergy they feltbetween what they were making then – and continue to make. Belangerand Park live and work in Brooklyn and Montreal, respectively.