Caitlin Devoy, BODYOBJECTS in Personal Structures, Palazzo Mora, Venice
Caitlin Devoy’s work is simultaneously seductive and unnerving, sensual and neutered, excoriating and tender. Devoy’s practice embraces the transgressive power of the comedic as both honey and sting, revealing the power relations encoded in representations of the body. The sculptures subvert everyday objects whose specific functions and tactile associations are familiar to the viewer. Her material choices underscore the humour, imbuing the objects with bodily characteristics and undermining binary representations of masculinity and femininity. This project is supported by Creative New Zealand.
“BODYOBJECTS recontextualizes the soft, yielding carcasses of voluptuous femininity, rendered luxuriantly passive by 30,000 years of Western art history. Taut silicone breasts with pert nipples act as light switches, conduits of an implied electricity. There is nothing dainty or modest about the racks on display and there’s also something slightly kitsch about them, like an item you might expect to find in John Waters’s summer home.
Phallic recorders dangle. Instead of vibrating silicone pleasure rods, or the modestly chiselled packages of classical dignity, they are endearingly, comically limp. Great flaccid cockflutes, exquisitely rendered in translucent silicone, as though wilted in a great orchestra fire. Equipped with requisite mouthpieces and delicate tone holes, begging to be played, the sculptures are undeniably funny. There’s a strange combination of emasculation and tenderness about them, like some rare, blind cave-dwelling amphibian, growing lungs and lurching inelegantly out of the primordial soup.”
NZ poet, Hera Lindsay Bird
An interview with Caitlin Devoy has been released this week as part of Crossing Currents: Aotearoa New Zealand Artists in Venice, a podcast series produced in 2024 by Contemporary HUM. Listen to the podcast, or read the interview here.
“Wade through an undulating, gelatinous landscape, both familiar and uncanny, in which these BODYOBJECTS are laid out, quivering and bare, like an adult-store mega warehouse, melting in a summer heatwave.
Mounds shiver. Nipples pop. Slime bubbles. Devoy’s BODYOBJECTS are indecently alive. They lie trembling on the brink of apprehension, inviting the viewer into a slow and intimate dance, teasing and eluding, in erotic pastiche and soft pink seriousness. Deliciously tactile, it’s impossible not to want to reach out and touch. To flick. To stroke. To blow. To slap. The viewer becomes voyeur, subject in a sea of possible nouns.
BODYOBJECTS recontextualizes the soft, yielding carcasses of voluptuous femininity, rendered luxuriantly passive by 30,000 years of Western art history. Taut silicone breasts with pert nipples act as light switches, conduits of an implied electricity. There is nothing dainty or modest about the racks on display and there’s also something slightly kitsch about them, like an item you might expect to find in John Waters’s summer home.
Phallic recorders dangle. Instead of vibrating silicone pleasure rods, or the modestly chiselled packages of classical dignity, they are endearingly, comically limp. Great flaccid cockflutes, exquisitely rendered in translucent silicone, as though wilted in a great orchestra fire. Equipped with requisite mouthpieces and delicate tone holes, begging to be played, the sculptures are undeniably funny. There’s a strange combination of emasculation and tenderness about them, like some rare, blind cave-dwelling amphibian, growing lungs and lurching inelegantly out of the primordial soup.
Devoy's work is full of startling contradictions. Both viscerally unnerving and oddly seductive. Pornographic and neutered. Excoriating and tender. Hilariously, decadently camp, but with a deadly serious intent. They are utterly fresh yet somehow ancient, like a pair of nipple tassels fluttering in a primaeval breeze.”
NZ poet, Hera Lindsay Bird
