The Opening Reception for “Mapping the Body: New Forms and Perspectives on the Human Figure,” will take place on Monday, September 14^th from 8-11 pm, at 37 West 28^th Street, 3^rd Floor, directly following the N:F:P Spring 2010 fashion show across the street at NYCAMS Gallery directly across the street (44 West 28^th Street, 7^th Floor from 6:30-8pm).

As the first show in a series of art exhibitions entitled Aesthetic Encounters, N:F:P has asked curator Selby Drummond to respond to the designer Gail Travis and the launch of her Body Mapping knitwear collection by assembling a group show exploring perspectives and reflections on the human body.

Selby Drummond has created, as a counterpoint to Travis’s work-which emphasizes self expression, change and connectivity through an elaborate and calculated process of defining and “mapping” the body-a collection of contemporary works in a variety of media which explore the figure, its limits, representations, forms and energies through strategies of reduction, abstraction, composites and light indexing. Through a study both of the literal presence of the form in space and the effect achieved by endowing inanimate forms with personalities and anthropomorphic gestures, the work comprises a spectrum between romantic homage to the purity of the nude and radical departures from figuration. Work which explicitly engages the body is juxtaposed with work which does not directly invoke the human figure, but teases us to draw parallels between materiality, form, energy and weight. The compilation, therefore, tests our addiction to the body’s legacies in imagery, upholding the charge that even abstract work contains (or inspires) vestiges of man’s subconscious desire to commune with art through a common language of anthropomorphism and psychic elevation. Featuring the work of artists Bill Durgin, Venske Spanle, Yeni Mao, Victoria Haven, Eric Shaw, Marty St. James, Olivia Malone, Chris McDonald, Matthew Callinan, and John Silvis, among others, this show seeks to survey the variety of contemporary methods of interrogating the self in art, and its psychic and literal proliferations in man-made objects and images.