A Show About Touching

Photos: Michael James Armstrong

Group Exhibition, Bread & Salt Gallery, 2019

A Show About Touching presents a group of artists exploring experiences of women’s desire through the evocation of bodily touch. Multiple types of touch, at times audaciously erotic and others quietly tender, suggest an expansive yet deeply personal interpretation of desire and the role it plays in women’s lives. The exhibition takes its title from Chantal Wnuk’s Another Painting About Touching. This work captures a couple in an intimate embrace, rendered in energetic, sensual strokes of paint, and demonstrates artists’ ability to treat the subject with nuance.

Working across mediums, some of these artists depict touching another and touching oneself. Some represent the absence of touch, which conjures anticipation and invokes desire as much as direct touch itself. All engage questions around agency—a woman’s right to define her desire and seek its fulfillment—a subject implicit in the work’s making, as well as choosing what to reveal to, and conceal from, the viewer. The artists in the exhibition push against, and at times break, traditional constructs around sexual inhibition, and use their work as a means for investigating this fundamental facet of women’s individual and collective experience.

Artists in the exhibition include Amel Janae, Chantal Wnuk, Emily Harter, Flavia D’Urso, Jessica Buie, Kate Clark, Sarah Farnsworth, Sister Chapman, and Tessie Salcido Whitmore.

A Show About Touching was curated during a residency at the San Diego-based residency program, After 1920.