SADE is pleased to present FLESHMAXXING, an exhibition by Kristin Reger and Maggie Petroni, curated by Bryan Munguia.
FLESHMAXXING exists in a bunker of unconscious dysmorphia, where amorphous entities coalesce into stretched sinews and petrified silks. Found objects scatter throughout the space to expose their memories of abused consumption. This disorienting theater is built by the carcasses of wooden canvas frames, staging penetrations to the body and psyche to reveal transmutations through new flesh.
The artists intentionally engage with the materiality of their works, embracing a McLuhanesque understanding that meaning resides within the “medium” of its message. Reger offers a masterclass in material fleshmaxxing, capturing contorted anatomies suspended in a primordial meditation. Her taut creations, supported by chaotic networks of butcher hooks and bungee ropes, stretch ossified flesh to the brink of rupture. These intricate systems mirror the cybernetic infrastructure of modern society—a web of deformities modeled after the pervasive influences of the internet.
Beneath Reger’s ascended relics, clusters of ceramic worms and dysfunctional forms complement Petroni’s monuments of upcycled materials. Petroni subverts the original commercial utility of her found objects by reconfiguring products into paranoid sigils possessing symbolism and invasive advertising. She uses objects of common culture to trace a genealogy of hyper-consumerism scaled to the velocity of evolving technologies. This framework positions our commodified culture as the prime fuel for social mania. Surveying our overconsumption, viewers are confronted with the side effects of dysmorphia transmitted through the algorithmic forces of a technocratic society.
In FLESHMAXXING, Reger and Petroni’s works converge to create a collective entity. The exhibition is an experimental collaboration between the artists, blurring the lines between installation and sculpture that traverses non-physical spaces such as “anonymous” webpages and targeted social media campaigns. The installation is designed to violate the senses, using video, audio, sculpture, and collage to induce a state of psychosis that examines our corporal relationship to consumer object rituals. Ultimately, the act of fleshmaxxing fuses anatomy and commodification as a singular symbiotic network.
FLESHMAXXING will be on view at SADE Gallery, 204 S Ave 19, Los Angeles, CA, from August 10th through August 25th, 2024. An opening reception will be held on August 10th from 7-11 PM, and curatorial and artist walkthroughs will be available by appointment or during SADE social sessions hosted on Sundays between 1-6 PM. For more information on FLESHMAXXING, please visit https://www.sade-la.com/ .
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
KRISTIN REGER (Chicago, 1984) explores bodies as unfixed, animated and interconnected. Reger’s sculptures, installations and performances indulge emotions and fantasies about human anatomy by fetishizing its parts, remaking it in an altered way and by pointing to its occupation between object and subject and between life and death. Material research and a performative physicality mark the essential strangeness of being and probe at what lies beyond limiting perceptions of our physical containers. Through manipulating media by stretching, suspending, and coating, Reger’s practice seeks traces of the incorporeal in the dysmorphic body-object warped to its breaking point. These uncanny objects evoke capital’s penetration of psyche and physicality in extreme, algorithmically-driven manifestations of flesh.
Reger earned her PhD and MFA from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City where she also completed the two-year Academic Program at SOMA. Solo exhibitions include: Wetwarp, Aparador Los Angeles 2022; Burst, Salón Silicón; IUDUIUDUI, ZsONA MACO, Rava Projects; New Works, Von Ammon Co, formerly in New York. Reger has participated in group exhibitions and performances in Mexico City at Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros (SAPS), Museo de Arte Carillo Gil, Galería Enrique Guerrero, Anonymous Gallery and DELI; as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCa), Boston; Museum of Sex (MoSex) New York.
MAGGIE PETRONI (Buenos Aires 1986) explores the limits between low and high culture as well as the derailment of human excess and the anarchic order that follows.
She produces installations, paintings and sculptures taking references from tuning, techno, cybernetic imagery, horror and science fiction. In her work, dissimilar objects are assembled and related in a frantic way exploring the alterity, the strange, the fascination with the exterior and the extrasensory in relation to the alienated. That which is beyond ordinary experiences.
Through her work, she researches the dynamism of social, technological, and sexual changes driven by capital. The mixture of excitement and anxiety before the imageries of the monstrous present, where ideas and impossible dualities, inherited by the modern conception of the world between mind/body, culture/nature, subject/object, human/nonhuman, masculine/feminine, seem to disintegrate. She considers object-oriented ontology, viewing anthropocentrism as a privilege of humans against non-humans.
Born in Argentina, she lives and works in Mexico. She was trained at the National University of Art as a licensed visual artist. In 2015, she participated in the National Fund for the Arts Training grant at the Haroldo Conti Cultural Center. In 2020, she attended the Artists Program at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and recently graduated from the SOMA (Mexico) educational program.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
BRYAN MUNGUIA (Los Angeles, 1998) is an independent curator who applies worldbuilding logic to the exhibition-making process. By leveraging his theatrical surroundings, he creates experiential projects that showcase artists through transnational artistic experimentation.
Previously, he curated for Aparador LA and Killscreen / Gameplayarts in Los Angeles. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London.
