My two piece exhibition featured Edgar Degas’ The Bath and Bill T. Jones by Tseng Kwong Chi and Keith Haring:

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The conversation between these two pieces focused on captured movement and potential energy. As a curator, I wanted to emphasize that the art here is not necessarily in the artists’ representation of the body, but in the contortion and motion of the body itself. In these two works, the bodies are frozen in one moment in time, but with my third object I wanted to break through that barrier of solid lines and definite borders of the body. Henri Matisse’s Nu couché de dos (Reclining nude, back view) captures a sense of continuous movement not seen in the other two pieces.

Not only does the movement of the figure appear in the drawing, but so does the movement of the artist, Matisse, as he rejects each prior line, changes his position or perspective, and reconstructs the figure before him piece by piece. In one drawing, he depicts countless bodies, each in a slightly different position than the one before like the images of a flip book drawn on pieces of transparent paper and layered on top of one another. The smudged erasures enact a similar vibration in the eye as the rapid, layered strokes of Degas’ painting or the optical illusion caused by the white stripes and shapes juxtaposed by the deep black of Bill T. Jones’s body, but adds something more like the phantoms of moments just passed or soon to come.