What is life like in the night forests of Madagascar, deep below the ocean’s waves, in an ancient adobe, or inside the body? What patterns of movement, design symmetries, or interspecies relations govern those environments? Put somewhat differently, what natural systems of making and learning guide the living creatures that are found in such places? Joy Curtis’s large-scale or wearable sculptures at Klaus von Nichtssagend, all made of fabric and hand-dyed by the artist with natural pigments, begin to suggest answers, moving us progressively farther from the stuff of material reality into abstractions that, presumably, we cannot see. Curtis expertly walks that line between depicting and suggesting, or representing and abstracting, so that ultimately the works’ lessons do not pertain primarily to any one life form, but speak more broadly to the intelligence of nature and premodern ways of life. Although the sculptures contain recognizable forms, they are especially adept at mining shared morphologies between different kinds of living things. A wing might also be a leaf, a stem might be a spine, a vertebra might be a beetle. Read More