“Spikes that bite” Group Show at Margot Same

December 14 – February 18, 2023

Images courtesy of Margot Samel and the artists

Margot Samel is pleased to present Spikes that bite, a group exhibition featuring artists Yui Kugimiya, Wynnie Mynerva, Narcissister, Mary-Audrey Ramírez, and Sevina Tzanou.

For the artists included in Spikes that Bite, desire is an anchor point to which the female form is constructed, negotiated, destroyed, and reclaimed. What does society expect of what is female or feminine? What does it demand it perform as? And what does it expect it to provide for its pleasure? Since the 1970’s expansion of feminist and psychoanalytic modes of critical analysis brought a new language to representations of sexuality, desire has been viewed as a motivational force for the means by which subject roles in society are structured. The five artists in this exhibition challenge and expand upon this subjective turn through illustrating how desire is multiplicity in and of itself, containing locus points not only projected onto the female body, but found from within and projected back outwards as strategies of survival, appropriation, and subversion. Materiality and figuration throughout the exhibition tend to these themes through a series of evocative portrayals of pleasure and pain. As each of these artists explore the cycles of rebirth inherent to the female form through situated societies and cultural practices, fragmentation and reformation repeat in mediated celebration of both the euphoric and the grotesque.