Amy Nathan

Ranging in scale from jewelry to architecture, Nathan’s work continues her material experimentation and her acute study of the distance between image and embodiment. Slipknot Loophole extends Nathan’s engagement with the clothing and tools that are meant to double, reshape and camouflage the body. Eclectic in form and playful in style, Nathan’s works are culled from sources both ancient and contemporary.

Flying Buttress, is a screen-like construction of hinged and painted wood that externalizes the corsetry lacework—hung along walls and pressed into corners in whimsical curlicues of acrylic, vinyl, paint and wood. The bows, ribbons and grommets that flex and release a corset are the sequential, calligraphic dots and lines that show up not only in the painted wood sculptures, but also as a series of drawings. These looping and drooping shapes pause for comic effect—marginalia’s doodles writ large. Nathan, a child of the 1980s, recalls the corsetry of Madonna’s Blond Ambition as the moment when undergarments moved from private to public.