Odessa Straub: Real-Puss Molting Center

SEPTEMBER is excited to present ‘Real-Puss Molting Center,’ a solo exhibition with Odessa Straub, opening Saturday, July 23, 5-7pm. Following her solo booth ‘Moltings,’ at NADA NY and the group exhibition WELL/BEING at University of Albany Museum, Straub will present works from the recent two years of her practice. The exhibition will include floor and wall sculptures fabricated from collected refuse and sourced materials, alongside works on collaged paper and canvas that directly correlate to her sculptures.

Straub’s evocative sculptures are bodily and performative. Each work is a character embodying a particular role that intermingles sexual play with the often-underreprepresented role of caregiving within that play. Toying with this possibly uncomfortable intersection, Straub challenges assumptions around power and empathy. She sidles up to the edges of taboo and tension, positioning care as the focal tenet through which to examine connection, sexuality and sexualization.

For Straub, the manifestation of each work is a form of molting: moving through discarded or shed personas that no longer serve her. Many of the objects themselves are from her past and bare signs of exhaustive use. Purging items that had been connected to her body and home, Straub transforms them into functional parts of a new whole. She physically persuades materials to behave at their limits- bound, hung, stretched and tied together in suspended action. For Straub, this behavior is linked to survival, being individually pushed to breaking points and sustained in tenuous balance.