Boiled

Hannah Levy presents seven new sculptures examining the uneasy relationship between the body and the designed world through visceral material interactions. About Hannah Levy (b. 1991, New York, NY) presents Boiled, her third exhibition at Casey Kaplan. Seven new sculptures examine the uneasy relationship between the body and the designed world through visceral material interactions. Combining blown glass with hand-carved and polished stainless steel, Levy draws on the anatomies of arthropods and serpents alongside references to furniture, Art Nouveau ornamentation, and mobility aids. Bubbling glass in warm, organic hues is blown through, encased, and compressed by jointed limbs, pointed extremities, and sinuous supports. Her creature-object hybrids hover between defense and vulnerability, playing with the inherent tensions of the structures and systems designed to support, protect, transport, and treat the body. In one wall-based work, two steel rods swirl around one another like intertwined snakes, recalling the caduceus, the staff carried by Hermes, Greek god of commerce and exchange. The snakes' heads are replaced by a pair of intimidating claws, a recurring motif in Levy's work, caught in the act of squeezing an organ-like glass orb. In the United States, the caduceus is conflated with the Rod of Asclepius, the traditional symbol of medicine, which depicts a single serpent coiled around a staff. Grasping talons further this blurred distinction between healing and commerce, complicating the promise of care, and revealing how systems designed to help exert control. At nearly nine feet tall, a three legged spindly sculpture centers on a bone-white glass chrysalis suspended within an expansive stainless steel armature, as if cradled by a precarious scaffold or streamlined Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) spider. Suspended between floor and ceiling, the pendulous form is caught mid-transformation as the glass swells against and through its metal cage. By subjecting the material to the centuries-old, still often unpredictable process of caged-glass blowing, Levy renders the shape simultaneously as a pulsating cocoon and a carefully wrought decorative object. A nearby multi-legged sculpture reimagines a pram, replacing its wheels with sharpened, arachnid-like limbs and its carriage with an open glass pod. Blown through its metal cage, the glass oscillates between the softness of flesh and the hardened exterior of an exoskeleton. The work's familiar point of departure becomes uncanny, transforming an object associated with nurturing and mobility into a structure that appears as menacing as it is sheltering. Both elegant and unsettling, Levy's sculptures serve as sensuous reminders of precarious negotiations–ornament and function, care and constraint, flesh and mechanism–making tangible how designed forms accommodate and constrain the bodies they encounter. Read more Toggle Sculpture Mixed media