Sam Grabowska’s Haptic Terrain at Leon Gallery explores how our bodies, oftentimes in grotesque fashion, mutate in contemporary capitalist culture.
Sam Grabowska: Haptic Terrain
September 28–November 09, 2024
Leon Gallery, Denver
Three days before the opening of Sam Grabowska’s (they/them) solo show Haptic Terrain at Leon Gallery in Denver, Colorado, I watched Coralie Fargeat’s new film The Substance starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley.
Without revealing too much, the film’s third act focuses on Monstro Elisasue—a hybrid creature amalgamating physical features of Moore and Qualley in a grotesque, carbuncled, and displaced manner. Monstro Elisasue’s gnarled and oozing flesh can be read as the mangled (and maligned) result of our country’s capitalist and patriarchal desire to consume beauty—to demand beauty—at the cost of our corporeal and psychological well-being. Our very flesh has become monstrous, disjointed, and blistered from our culture’s unchecked and self-destructive craving for superficial glamour and the seduction of youth.
It’s difficult to disentangle the images and messaging of Fargeat’s film from Grabowska’s artworks when viewing them in proximity. For, indeed, many of the objects in Haptic Terrain appear as abscessed and mutilated flesh. The surface of All of Man is An Island (all works 2024), composed of melted and sculpted grocery bags and insulation, bears a striking resemblance to Monstro Elisasue’s skin—a discolored and rutted topography punctuated with errant hairs and pustules.
Many of these ideas are echoed—or, at very least, intimated at—in Grabowska’s artist statement. The artist asks: how do our bodies “mutate, evolve, and adapt to endure a hostile world” and the inherent “brutality of [its] paved-over paradise”? While they do hope for a future wherein our bodies can “prevail,” Grabowska understands our current reality points toward an “intimacy of disgust [and] the familiarity of struggle,” as opposed to a prelapsarian return to perfect bodies environed in the antiseptic glory of Eden. No—our species’ lot has been cast, and it is repugnant. The artist’s task, then, is to make repugnance aesthetic, recalibrate our conceptualization of it, and offer another path forward—one that leads our collective disfiguration towards vulnerability, acceptance, and a queering of beauty standards, as opposed to a solipsistic death spiral championed by tech bros, developers, financiers, and oligarchs in which AI, algorithms, and free-floating capital terraform our world into a brave new, dystopic landscape.
The artist’s task, then, is to make repugnance aesthetic, recalibrate our conceptualization of it, and offer another path forward.
The work in Haptic Terrain, though, rarely feels didactic or heavy handed. Take the installation Remote Sensing, for instance. Composed of conduit, insulation foam, grocery bags, and concrete, five arched bands of different lengths, approximately six inches thick, span the distance between two perpendicular walls. Fishing line suspends each band from the ceiling. The bands appear both to support the walls laterally and float ethereally in the gallery space. The first, third, and fifth bands are shorter, located in a more interior position, and are concrete-like in appearance. The second and fourth bands are longer, located in a more exterior position, and affect the appearance of deformed flesh (similar to All of Man is An Island).
On the one hand, crafting industrial materials into misshapen, flesh-like bands in service of architectural support seems rather demoralizing. In essence, someone has leveraged our deformation into workable, construction material. We have become objects akin to trusses and joists, mere support for some hideous technocratic urbanscape. This, of course, is a rather pessimistic interpretation of Remote Sensing.
A more optimistic reading of Remote Sensing would be: yes, we have become repugnant. But let us lean into our repugnance and construct a new society, a new world, a new architecture informed by our deformations and our traumas. Let us exalt in our physical, psychological, and material realities. Let us imagine a future world in which these mutated bodies are not marginalized, vilified, sanctioned, or scorned. Let us imagine, rather, a world in which they both support our material surroundings and levitate angelically as aesthetic beings in space.
How one understands the artworks in Haptic Terrain becomes a matter of positionality and the interpretations which it produces. By accepting ourselves—grotesqueries and all—are we active agents in the creation of our future world? A world in which humanity exists and strengthens in a shared embrace and the “intimacy of disgust”? Or do we think of ourselves as shameful objects exploited as the foundation and framework for a future wherein its inhabitants will look back on us—if remembered at all—as the vile precursors to a more beautiful world?
While we as individuals—or a society—must choose our lot, the artworks in Haptic Terrain are under no obligation to do so. And this is their strength. Just as The Substance concludes with the Wildean gesture of lying in the gutter while looking at the stars—thus yoking contradictory impulses into a poignant, cinematic moment—Grabowska’s art objects are of at least two minds. In doing so, they open a space for dialogue, discussion, and a multiplicity of future imaginaries.