This past Christmas, two high school friends and I convened to hike our old favorite trail along the Blue Ridge Mountains, for the first time in ten years. One of them told our group about a kid he works with in Vermont — a 23 year old who very clearly doesn’t yet realize he’s going to die. I mused aloud how interesting that phenomenon is. I distinctly remember transitioning into a person aware of their own mortality at 27. It’s kind of strange, still being able to recall life before. Those halcyon days spent living above the law should not have been a privilege, but they were.
Funny how the death drive subsides once you realize you don’t have a say. Then, loving life forces one to contend with that timeless urge for everlasting youth. Life and death, beauty and the grotesque, these opposites that cruelly make our mortal lives precious, all collide in “Levity and Depth,” a new show in Brooklyn by Houston and New York-based sculptor Lesley Bodzy.
Bodzy spent the first three years after earning her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021 predominantly making gold sculptures that probed the beauty industry’s veil of deception. This show’s exploded, sagging, iridescent and bubblegum forms, meanwhile, reveal the delicious ugliness underneath, through textures that beg the question “how did she do that?”
Well, Bodzy’s techniques took root during her studies, when she fell for the sausage-shaped sculptures of Eva Hesse — who spent her short life grappling with insecurity and rubbing shoulders with New York art elite, producing truly original works from a female perspective while resisting the label ‘woman artist.’ Hesse would inflate balloons into sausage-like shapes, then wrap them in string, Bodzy learned. Then, someone else turned her onto Lynda Benglis’s foam works, which ooze and flow while embodying the organic, chaotic forces of gravity and chance.
Last Spring, after grieving her father, Bodzy connected the two series by inflating balloons with foam. If they didn’t pop on their own, she’d prick them herself. Like Benglis, Bodzy doesn’t know how each artwork will shake out, though she’s starting to learn. Each one has a two-part name, written as if in official biological taxonomy — with the first word capitalized, and the second not.
One corner-hanging tapestry named Cattywampus zoanthropy (all works 2024), for instance, shimmers like a spectral skin, with an alluring, wispy, delicately textured surface. It’s the shard of a massive, resin-coated weather balloon that exploded right in the artist’s movie star-like face. “That was the only one that ever hurt me,” Bodzy told me. She’s substituted the functional metal suspensions on other works with ornate chains and pearls, dressing them up. Sometimes she adds color to the foam beforehand, or applies acrylic paint and ink to the forms afterwards. To Bodzy, the results resemble ancient, colorful sea slugs, slithering sexually along the ocean floor.
“When I was younger, I remember thinking, ‘Well, okay, my grandparents are dying, but it’s not going to happen to me,’” Bodzy mused. She started taking death more seriously ten years ago, when she started losing friends. “I was in denial,” she said. “I look very young. I’ve been working at it for — 30 years at least. I started Botox when I was 35… because I look younger, people treat me as younger.” Bodzy sees that she’s complicit in a con against women. Her gold works took that admission a modicum further, acknowledging that some women don’t have the luxury of eschewing beauty standards, because there’s a very real economic benefit to heeding them.
Bodzy’s latest works, however, don’t yearn for false beauty, but embody new possibilities, from the richly varied textures on Translucent fragility to the ethereal destitution of Shrouded cicatrix.
Although Bodzy brought scores of experiments meant to sit on plinths or the ground, M. David & Co founder Michael David predominantly selected her suspended biomorphic sculptures while curating this show, creating an effect that critic Qinyuang Deng adeptly likened to an amusement park. You’re even allowed to finger the shiny black and lavender ribbons on Aqueous inheritance, or test the weight of Uncharted incandescence, which looks like a big pink berry from a fairytale forest. The high-mounted torso of Unfathomable limerence and concrete feet on Caustic retrogenesis mark the next steps in Bodzy’s efforts testing different “receivers” for her poured materials. She’ll show more spandex works like these in Future Fair later this Spring.
This tactile element to “Levity and Depth” has a dangerous potential to feel gimmicky. But, it works. Bodzy is letting viewers in on what she’s learned. Play can stymie the fear of mortality. And, it’s not just feel-good drivel: sometimes the imperfections of age really are enhancements.
Lesley Bodzy, Levity and Depth March 7th – March 29th, 2025 M. David & Co. Gallery
