Final Hot Desert is pleased to present Laminar Body^ies, a solo presentation of Natalia Janula’s exquisitely delicate mixed media sculptures, assemblages, and latex photographic prints, installed amid cutting rays of sun and gusts of lake air on the salt-foaming shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake.
The earth as a body, its material its flesh, a fleeting organism now made up of its rawest elements, life, and industrial scapes, expresses its contemporary mythology in its most evanescent traces. Each sentience and movement is imprinted and left between sensuous decay and fossilization. Mother Earth rejects humankind’s compounds and leaves them to glitter on her shores and in her mud as they communicate with one another in languages they no longer understand, a Babellian complex of objects removed from their original purpose, cast in latex, spilling moss, pierced, hopeless in their fragility...
Like a mermaid’s corpse, or an ancient hero, Janula’s naked sculptures find themselves washed ashore, making attempts at alluding to function, while taking on new energies as their luminous laminae are exposed to their own origin of blasted particles. Together, they tell their story(ies) of chemical interaction, pressurized organs, and extended arms of unknown intention and genuine eagerness.
What does a chemically preserved flower hear, as it sprouts from a silicon ear? What does a tiny hand feel, as it presses against a rugged stone and rocks its cradle? What skin and body does a latex dress caress, as it lies pierced and unworn?
Each impression upon material is an erotic birthmark of incomplete, precarious being. Each trace of biological utility is nullified and rebirthed through a new material cognition of nonhuman, nonplant, nonflesh, divided into peeling layers of fractal apparition.
.jpg)
-13.jpg)
