Cynthia Eardley at Freddy

Artist: Cynthia Eardley

Exhibition title: DOG

Venue: Freddy, New York, US

Date: May 12 – June 24, 2017

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Freddy

Welcome back to another season of programming. Freddy is excited to begin with an exhibition of sculpture by New York-based artist Cynthia Eardley.

Marisol once said she began making humorous sculptures because she was feeling depressed and they lifted her spirits.

Like most humans who have the pleasure of living with a dog, I am pulled into her enthusiastic worldview every morning, as she expresses with utmost clarity her great joy at starting a new day, surrounded by her human “pack.”

In this series of portraits, I am attempting to convey, through facial expression and formal rhythm, the psychological states of this highly eccentric hound dog who inspires me to laugh. I am also delighted by the rhythmic flow and symmetry of her forms. Her emotional and sometimes irrational personality springs from a vessel of rational, formal clarity: At rest, from above, her head and ears form a single, perfect, isosceles triangle. From the side, her tail is a perfect upward curve complementing the large arc of her chest and the reverse arc of her abdomen. From behind, when seated, her rib cage and haunches form two intersecting circles topped by an ellipse. She is absolutely symmetrical—until she isn’t. Her movements stir a wild metamorphosis of liquid curves that are her ears, jowls, tongue, and other facial and bodily features, depending on the circumstances, as they respond to surrounding air currents and her own shifting psychological states.

I did have one other purpose from the start of this series: to contribute, from a different perspective, to the growing acceptance of the sentient and mental capacities of other species. We humans will not survive without them.

Cynthia Eardley’s figurative sculptures have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums nationwide, including the Monique Knowlton Gallery, Museum of South Texas, Huntsville Museum, New Museum of Contemporary Art, and more recently, Sideshow, Ceres, and Mishkin galleries (New York). Her work has been discussed in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Sculpture, The Village Voice, The Nation, Sculpture Review, and ARTnews magazine, where her figurative sculpture was featured in “Middle-Aged Gods and Giant Babies” by Cynthia Nadelman. Former co-founder and co-director of the architecture/public arts group SITE, Inc, her trompe-l’oeil design for Best Products in Richmond, Va., the “Peeling Project,” was the first in a series by SITE that was reviewed and exhibited worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (NYC). A 2005 monograph (SITE: Identity in Density, Images Publishing, Melbourne) features several examples of her early architectural work. In 2014, her “Underlake Environment” and “Glass Bridge Between Mountains” were featured in Alberto Giorgio Cassani’s treatise on architectural metaphor, Figure del Ponte (Bologna, Edizioni Pendragon). She has taught sculpture, anatomy, and critical theory at the New York Academy of Art Graduate School of Figurative Art for many years and participated in numerous lectures and arts conferences nationwide. Her writings on art have been published in The Brooklyn Rail, where she was a contributing writer; the Women’s Caucus on Art National Update, and most recently, Bomb magazine.