Embattled Bodies: Displacement, Trauma, and Resistance

a guest exhibition by the Mid-South Sculpture Alliance and juror Karlota Contreras-Koterbay

Read about the exhibition in this BHMSTR article!

Exhibition dates: November 12, 2022 – January 7, 2023

Gallery hours: 10am–2pm on Fridays and Saturdays, and by appointment

Embattled Bodies: Displacement, Trauma, and Resistance, is a group exhibition of sculpture presented by the Mid-South Sculpture Alliance (MSA), who appointed a juror, Karlota Contreras-Koterbay, to select the artworks in the exhibition. This is Vinegar’s first guest exhibition, and we are proud to work with the MSA artists for this show.

Statement from juror Karlota Contreras-Koterbay:

The theme for this exhibition is the Body, the governed, embattled, empowered bodies of resistance and agency. From Black Lives Matter to the aggressive assault on the Roe Vs. Wade decision or the rights for trans youth to receive care, our bodies are in a constant struggle for autonomy, equality, and self-representation. Through this exhibition, MSA and Stove Works employ the agency of art as a platform for visibility and discourse. Artists are encouraged to submit works that redefine, reinvestigate and recontextualize the body and its politics. The selection criteria favors diversity in media/perspective and innovation in a form that prompts critical dialogue, yet are inclusive, empowering, and serve as an embodiment of contemporary issues. 

The exhibition features three dimensional or installation artworks that portray the human body as forms of resistance, memory, experience, and history. Body as a form of resistance includes dissent, struggle, and pain, it is persistent and unbound. Body as memory, as physical manifestations of recollection, reflection, and remembering. Body as experience, as a resolution of the will and manifestations of the imagination, elaboration of life lived. Body as history, as anatomical documents, evidence of the past, and surfaces of record for battlegrounds of battles won and lost.

Embattled strives for self representation, and visibility including work resulting from reflective discourse, self gaze, and critical commentary that moves past the simplistic, voyeuristic tradition of the female nude. It celebrates the Body in all its complex forms, clothed, stripped, naked, battered, pampered, and all variances. The Body is portrayed for its overflowing potential as vessels of time, markers of place and repository of memory.

Mid-South Sculpture Alliance is a non-profit arts organization that advances the creation and awareness of sculpture and sculptors. MSA creates opportunities for its members through exhibition, education, and networking opportunities centered on traditional and contemporary approaches to sculpture.