A Hug From The Art World is delighted to present Tender Spawn,
an exhibition of new work by Felix Beaudry.
The exhibition opens on Thursday, May 2nd, with a reception from 6-8 pm, and runs through June 8th. Tender Spawn is Beaudry’s first exhibition at A Hug From The Art World.
Felix Beaudry and his Stoll M1 knitting machine work in tandem. Beginning with the machine’s modeling software, Beaudry creates a flat, structural pattern within the fabric. Only once those forms have been knit by the machine, the fabric sewed together by hand and subsequently stuffed, can he finally see its three-dimensional form. Edits are drawn onto the structural pattern and Beaudry begins again. Thus, he sees the work as “something that emerges from me, the program, and the machine.”
In Beaudry’s freestanding sculpture, PVC armatures provide the “skeleton” around which these nets of “skin” are formed and subsequently stuffed. The handmade is digitized and then finished by hand once again. Similarly fashioned, his wall-mounted textiles continue the architectural tradition of grotesques, fantastic figures amalgamating human and mythical features, and challenge the more modern negative connotation of ‘grotesque’ as aesthetic judgment. To portray the grotesque is to acknowledge the complexity beyond normative beauty. Emmanuel Kant noted that the sublime will “arouse enjoyment but with horror,” not of the sort in scary movies, but rather compartmentalized existential truths.
Despite being infinitely complex internal beings, humans are bound by corporeality. Recalling childhood camping trips, Beaudry once said that his family’s tent remained the same nylon shell and tent poles despite a rotating cast of campers sleeping in it from one summer to the next. Instead, the artist imagines a world where the tent can change along with its inhabitants.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
FELIX BEAUDRY (b. 1996 Berkeley, CA; lives and works in Kingston, NY) graduated with a BFA from RISD in 2018. Beaudry has held solo exhibitions at SITUATIONS (New York, NY), who represent the artist, and at Tatjana Pieters, Gent, Belgium. Group exhibitions include The Bunker, West Palm Beach, FL; The Machine-Gunneress in a State of Grace at Foreland, Catskill, NY (curated by New Discretions); Rocking Rookies at Tatjana Pieters 2019 (Ghent, Belgium); ecdysis II at ltd Los Angeles 2019 (LA, CA); Fresh Fruit at Situations, 2018 (New York, NY), and Designing Traditions at the RISD Museum 2018.