Lesley Bodzy: Levity and Depth
M. David & Co. at Art Cake
Friday / Saturday, 1 - 6 pm and by appointment
March 7 – March 29, 2025
Art Cake: 214 40th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11232
Opening Reception:
March 7, 2025, 6-9pm
M. David & Co. Gallery is pleased to present Levity and Depth, Lesley Bodzy's first solo exhibition in Gallery B, opening on Friday, March 7 from 6 - 9 pm.
Levity and Depth: Contrasts and Confluences in New Sculptures by Lesley Bodzy
by Paul D’Agostino
Contradictions, dichotomies, counterpoints, and polarities imply instances of contrast, division, opposition, and dissimilarity. They point to notions of paradoxes and incongruities, and to ideas of variable distinctions pitched at distant extremities.
All such circumstances are, in broad strokes, relational. While indicative of difference and disequilibrium, they can also be situated along lines of interconnectedness. To be fully understood, indeed, they must be. Their relativities entail placements on common spectrums or conveyance through shared mediums. There’s no counterbalancing, for example, without something on either side of some semblance of a balance. The counterpoint to a point only expresses its full significance if the point in question has been expressed sufficiently enough to be meaningfully countered. ‘This one here’ makes more demonstrative sense if there’s also a ‘that one there’. And back and forth, and vice-versa, and so on.
Decoupled, these types of relationships become weakened or incoherent, or they fall apart entirely. Yet insofar as they remain coupled in some way, they cohere. Such coupled relativities of contrasting relationships, contradictory elements, and oppositional circumstances are an abiding source of inspiration for sculptor Lesley Bodzy. They inform how she selects and amalgamates various materials for her mixed-media sculptures, and they furnish conceptual grist to latch onto while contemplating formal qualities, palette choices, and process-related moves, and when determining if certain pieces have reached their moments of completion in states of subtly raw messiness or delicate finesse. Experimentation is of paramount importance to the artist, and she embraces it in ways that allow for planning and happenstance to come into procedurally active and readily visible confluence.
Bodzy’s interests in material convergence and thematic divergence furnish the aesthetic backbone for Levity and Depth, the artist’s solo exhibition of new sculptures at M. David & Co. Gallery. Working in her studios in New York City and Houston, Bodzy has created a multivalent body of work conceived, for the purposes of the exhibition, as a large-scale, site-specific installation featuring, on the one hand, counterbalanced couplings of formally interconnected pieces and, on the other, counterpointing aggregations of autonomous objects. Arranged in various configurations from floor to ceiling, Bodzy’s curiously amorphous, bizarrely bulbous works hover and loom in her capacious workspaces, dangling around and sprawling about in an atmosphere of cavernous shadow-play, suspended kinetics, and ecstatic, somewhat sci-fi theatrics. Many of the hanging works feature balloons in variable states of full or partial inflation, or even impact-suggestive deflation, ostensibly the material consequence of subjection to pour-overs, sprays, drizzlings, and somewhat contained yet forceful dumpings of interactive materials such as resin, acrylic paint, and polyurethane foam. While materials such as these evidence a degree of chemical sameness given their shared essential properties as plastics, their existence in very differently inert or activated states at the moment of incorporation into the creative process – solids and pseudo-solids, liquids of various weights and viscosities, gaseous billows and expansions, stretchy elastics – ensure that they’ll react to, counteract, and interact with one another, catalyzing formal and material destabilization and metamorphosis before settling into place, balancing each other out, establishing a level of functionally stable equilibrium. Bodzy’s sculptures are thus the consequence and embodiment of all this pushing and pulling, inflating and deflating, eventually curing and cohering activity. Oppositional yet resolvable forces are captured in, laid bare by, and remain readily identifiable through the resulting works.
Rather less identifiable, however, is what these objects are, or what they might be intended to be. Their formal aspects register as both vaguely familiar and otherworldly. Their multivalent plastic-ness is plain enough, but they also seem to cosplay as various other material realities: ceramics, blown glass, organic curiosities, mineral deposits, extracted and preserved organs. For Bodzy, such elusive identifiability is the point. Most simply, the sculptures are what they are, or what they turned out to be, by dint of the instantiation and working-out of material processes. The artist’s aim is for the sculptures to serve as abstracted vessels of the themes of contradiction, paradox, and incongruity that inspire her, while also furnishing tangible attestation to the possibility of resolution. Bodzy seeks also to convey with them something of the mysteries of life and death, and the effects of time and aging on the body, as well as an array of related dualities: inhalation and exhalation, accretion and secretion, intention and chance, rawness and refinement, natural and artificial, beautiful and abject, sensual and unemotional, shiny polish and goopy mess. In palette and form alike, flesh-tone works such as Translucent Fragility, Instinctual Sciamachy, and Rancorous Glare appear to carry these themes with a sense of carnal vitality and apparent lightness, while larger, more formally complex and chromatically heavier pieces such as Diaphanous Nebula, Unsteady Contingency, and Multiplicitous Instances hint at these matters much more enigmatically, and with substantial weightiness and gravitas. The yields of so many reactive processes, interactive forces, and invasive interventions, Bodzy’s sculptures attain modes of enduring rest in states of deeply curious elegance.
In Levity and Depth, Lesley Bodzy makes a prodigious display of counterpoints and distinctions, incongruities and divergences, and contrasts and differences. But she also makes plain that interconnections are inherent to such circumstances as well, and that resolution and equilibrium can be wholly plausible if not inevitable outcomes of resistive processes. In Bodzy’s sculptures, semantic and formal abstractions find expressive resolve through experimental actions and material interactions. Their curiously restful allure lures you into looking, and their deeply nuanced look lures you into lingering.
– Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D. is an artist, writer, educator, curator, and translator. He is Writing and Thesis Advisor for the MFA program at The New York Studio School, and a regular visiting critic and instructor for several other institutions and residency programs. D’Agostino teaches writing workshops, is a translator and editor working in various languages, and writes about art, books, and film on a freelance basis.
