Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce Dustbox, the gallery's first exhibition with Michelle Uckotter. Uckotter's mysterious, darkened interiors draw the viewer into a fascinating world of distorted perspectives and enigmatic narratives. In some works, the human presence is implied, in others the scene is populated by a doll-like female protagonist. With influences as diverse as Francis Bacon, Hans Bellmer, and Japanese and American horror aesthetics, Uckotter's cinematic narratives are at once sinister, seductive, and even humorous in their embrace of a camp sensibility.
‘’Each fragmentary scene from Michelle Uckotter’s Dustbox teases out psychosexual drama yet eludes narrative deciphering. Her paintings of spatially dizzying interiors, populated by figures strewn about like dolls, reverberate with the creak of a high heel against a rotting floorboard. Uckotter constructs these rooms on the verge of collapse, like women on the verge of a nervous breakdown.’’ - Daisy Sanchez
I forgot if it was you who discarded me or if it was my own shame–or lack thereof–that sequestered me. Did I fall up these stairs to arrive here amidst domestic ruins? I’m welcomed by a kiss of dust. Its ashen residue clings to me. The viral sediment’s light touch reaches every crevice, each orifice. Weighing on lashes and seeping under eyelids, entering scraped cheeks, knees, stigmata–coursing through my bloodstream. Dust chokes my bronchial tubes, settling in my ass crack. Maybe I am not so distant from the degraded interiors that encase me. Dust finds a way into the porous wood structures that convulse around me, seize up and release, with the throb of a migraine. I swipe across a surface only to be penetrated by splinters. Am I here to find redemption in Kiefer’s attic, the abysmally cramped conversion space of repression? I’m a sultry and sacrificial vision, a lapsed Catholic nailed to a cross. I’m the Borghese Venus on a Bernini mattress expiring into a mess of blankets. I become Bellmer’s altered landscape of flesh, dressing up or dressing down, with a cigarette pursed between my lips. I’m cool but colder to the touch. Don't you know it’s freezing up here? I can only see you from under tresses, peaking out from behind curtains of hair and shadows. I’m not Degas’ dancer, I’m a showgirl. Coquettishly flash a leg, bare bottoms, the dark underbelly of a bra. The walls of cavernous rooms sharply recede to a point at which I vanish. You can only see as much of me as I let you. The door may be locked but it’s nearly falling off its hinges. Get punished. Get banished. Good girls get wrecked. If I fall through the rafters, will you catch me?
- Daisy Sanchez
Michelle Uckotter (b. 1992) is a Cincinnati born artist based in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include King’s Leap (New York, NY), t293 (Rome, Italy), Springsteen Gallery (Baltimore, MD) and A.D. Gallery (New York, NY). Selected group exhibitions include Lubov (New York, NY), Galerie Hussenot (Paris, France), In Lieu (Los Angeles, CA), Sebastian Gladstone (Los Angeles, CA), Deli Gallery (New York, NY), envy6011 (Wellington, New Zeland), and Interstate Project (Brooklyn, NY).