Isabelle Albuquerque&rsquo;s sculptures explore and subvert the centuries-long tradition of stolen female agency throughout art history.

Photography Drew Escriva

A visit to <a href="https://www.instagram.com/isabellealbuquerque/?hl=en" title="Isabelle Albuquerque" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Isabelle Albuquerque&rsquo;s</a>&nbsp;studio overlooking LA&rsquo;s MacArthur Park feels a bit like an archaeological excavation, with clues to her process and inspirations scattered about. Tacked to the walls are images of the Wicked Witch of the West, Classical Greek sculpture, and a painting of a victim of the Salem Witch Trials. Several cast wax feet, in shades ranging from ivory to amber to chocolate brown, are neatly arranged on low shelves, above which hang three Shaker brooms. Family photos of her mother, the artist <a href="https://www.litaalbuquerque.com/" title="Lita Albuquerque" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lita Albuquerque</a>, her grandmother, and great-grandmother&mdash;all <a href="https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/teaching-resources-for-historians/teaching-and-learning-in-the-digital-age/linking-family-history-and-world-history/sephardic-jews-and-their-history" title="Sephardic Jews" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sephardic Jews</a> from Tunisia&mdash;are laid out on a table in preparation for an upcoming monograph. In the center of the room, there is an apparatus somewhere between an exercise bench and bondage harness that Albuquerque uses to perfect the pose she will take for a bronze sculpture she&rsquo;s finishing: a kneeling, headless figure astride a broom, her back arched in ecstasy.
&ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to lace the broom with hallucinogenic flying ointment,&rdquo; she says excitedly. &ldquo;Talk about a performance of power. She&rsquo;s on her knees, but she&rsquo;s flying. I think of magic as the tool of the powerless.&rdquo;
This bronze will be the penultimate work in an ambitious series of ten figurative sculptures collectively titled &ldquo;Orgy For Ten People in One Body&rdquo; that Albuquerque has been working on for the past three years. Parts of the series have been exhibited in Los Angeles at <a href="https://www.nicodimgallery.com/" title="Nicodim Gallery" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Nicodim Gallery</a>, <a href="https://deitch.com/" title="Jeffrey Deitch" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jeffrey Deitch</a>, and <a href="https://www.h-r.la/" title="Human Resources" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Human Resources</a>, but it will be shown in full for the first time at her upcoming solo show in November at <a href="https://deitch.com/new-york/exhibitions" title="Jeffrey Deitch&rsquo;s Wooster Street Gallery" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jeffrey Deitch&rsquo;s Wooster Street Gallery</a> in New York.

Isabelle's Studio

&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not easy to make figurative sculpture that&rsquo;s fresh and new. It has been done since the dawn of art,&rdquo; says Deitch. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s quite an achievement to have a new perspective, not just one but 10. She has a really deep vision.&rdquo;
All 10 works in the &ldquo;Orgy&rdquo; are based on Albuquerque&rsquo;s own body, captured either through body casts or 3-D scans, and rendered in various materials: wood, wax, rubber, bronze, and resin. Each work represents a different &ldquo;performance of power,&rdquo; as Albuquerque describes it, referencing and subverting ways that women have been depicted and denied agency throughout (art) history, mostly by men. The first work in the &ldquo;Orgy&rdquo; is a shiny, metallic, reclining figure from whose vagina emerges a saxophone, a play on the Greek myth of <a href="https://www.greeklegendsandmyths.com/leda.html" title="Leda and the Swan" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Leda and the Swan</a> in which Zeus takes the form of a swan to rape the heroine. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s been covered again and again. It&rsquo;s one of the erotic scenes that&rsquo;s been painted thousands of times. I&rsquo;m really interested in that. Why do we keep coming back and re-making it?&rdquo; she asks.
The fifth in the series is a classic odalisque in the style of <a href="https://www.jeanaugustedominiqueingres.org/" title="Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres</a>, though Albuquerque&rsquo;s version has hooves and is covered in flocked resin, hand-painted to resemble a deer hide&mdash;wild and untameable as opposed to subservient. Other works reference <a href="https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/birth-of-venus" title="Botticelli&rsquo;s Venus" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Botticelli&rsquo;s Venus</a>, rendered in an earthy walnut; <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Romulus-and-Remus" title="Romulus and Remus" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Romulus and Remus</a>, the founders of Rome, who suckled at the teats of a she-wolf, reimagined as cuddly teddy bears perched on breast and crotch; and even British Pop Artist <a href="http://www.artnet.com/artists/allen-jones/" title="Allen Jones" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Allen Jones</a>&rsquo; erotic mannequins, considered either monuments to misogyny or cheeky piss-takes on minimalism, depending on who you ask. Albuquerque&rsquo;s black, rubber figure on all fours maintains the sexual charge of Jones&rsquo; works while keeping the viewer at a cool remove. She transforms poses of submission into stances of defiance.

"Most of my life, I&rsquo;ve been in my head&hellip;it&rsquo;s like ecstasy in orgasm when you don&rsquo;t think for a minute."

The final work in the series, and the only one with a head, is based on <a href="https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/stefano-maderno" title="Stefano Maderno" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Stefano Maderno&rsquo;s</a> Baroque funerary sculpture of <a href="https://www.abourtart.com/post/a-sculpted-corpse" title="Saint Cecilia" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Saint </a><a href="https://www.abourtart.com/post/a-sculpted-corpse" title="Saint Cecilia" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Cecilia</a>, the third-century martyr and patron saint of musicians whose executioner failed to sever her head fully despite striking it with his sword three times. (She died of her injuries three days later.) When her tomb was unearthed in 1599, her body was found in perfect condition, or &ldquo;incorruptible.&rdquo; Maderno&rsquo;s sculpture portrays her as she was supposedly found: lying on her side, knees bent, her head turned down, sword marks visible on her neck. Although Albuquerque&rsquo;s wax version will have a head, its face will be obscured by cascading human hair, giving it a sense of anonymity shared by its headless sisters&mdash;an anonymity that invites viewers to see themselves in the figure. It also stresses the corporeal nature of the work, as opposed to the cerebral.
&ldquo;Most of my life, I&rsquo;ve been in my head, so losing the head&mdash;it&rsquo;s like ecstasy in orgasm when you don&rsquo;t think for a minute. That&rsquo;s like a dream for my particular existence,&rdquo; she explains.
Despite the conceptual and material richness of the &ldquo;Orgy,&rdquo; Albuquerque came to sculpture quite recently. For most of her artistic career, she was a performer and musician, collaborating with her creative and romantic partner Jon Ray in the experimental band <a href="http://hecuba.us/info.php" title="Hecuba" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Hecuba</a>. The two met in the early aughts when Albuquerque was studying theater at Barnard and Ray was making a film about a woman abducted by aliens. &ldquo;Everyone was like, &lsquo;I know the girl for you,&rsquo;&rdquo; she jokes.

Coats, boots, and gloves KWAIDAN EDITIONS

Coat, boots, and gloves KWAIDAN EDITIONS

As part of the band&rsquo;s conceptual bent, the pair &ldquo;lived as two people in one body,&rdquo; shaving their heads and bodies to erase gender distinctions. She describes it as a precursor to the &ldquo;Orgy,&rdquo; an early exploration of blurring the boundaries between individuals.
A few years ago, the couple started <a href="https://osk.co/" title="OSK" target="_blank" rel="noopener">OSK</a>, a design and production studio that utilizes AI. They worked on projects for NASA, film director <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0322242/" title="Jonathan Glazer" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jonathan Glazer</a>, and cinematographer and artist <a href="https://mcachicago.org/About/Who-We-Are/Artists/Arthur-Jafa" title="Arthur Jafa" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Arthur Jafa</a>, who Albuquerque describes as a mentor. (The two first bonded over their love for iconic outlaw artist Kenneth Anger.) Then the music stopped.
&ldquo;Most of my life, I sang. I just always had a song coming out, but I took it for granted and I lost it. I just stopped singing, and it was so painful. I lost my voice for a couple of years,&rdquo; she recalls. It was around the 2016 election, and the collective tension was palpable. &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t expect to be a sculptor,&rdquo; she says, but she began mixing plaster in the bathroom outside their Chinatown office and making rough sculptures in the early mornings, almost compulsively. &ldquo;Now it&rsquo;s so integrated in my life, but at the time it was pretty weird. I couldn&rsquo;t stop sculpting these figures.&rdquo;
At OSK, Albuquerque was working on a new project, feeding thousands of images of nudes from across cultures and eras into the AI so it could generate its own nude paintings. The narrow representational scope of canonical nudes was made glaringly apparent. &ldquo;This is when the &lsquo;Orgy&rsquo; was born too,&rdquo; she notes. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s no coincidence that I started what I was hoping to be like a new kind of nude at that time.&rdquo;

Another significant event in the creation of the &ldquo;Orgy&rdquo; was the <a href="https://www.nps.gov/samo/learn/management/2018-woolsey-fire.htm" title="Woolsey Fire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Woolsey Fire</a> that burned down Lita Albuquerque&rsquo;s Malibu home and studio in November 2018. Isabelle had been her mother&rsquo;s studio manager and keeper of her archives, much of which were lost in the fire. &rdquo;I always kind of thought, before the fire, my whole job would be to keep her legacy and my grandmother&rsquo;s legacy alive,&rdquo; she says wistfully, &ldquo;and in a weird way, this work is that. You carry that information in your body and I can&rsquo;t look at these [sculptures] and not think of all the women in my family that look like me...Sometimes I think of myself less as a singular entity and more like a strand of DNA...just part of this much longer call and response.&rdquo;
As much as Isabelle Albuquerque&rsquo;s works are about the here and now, the body in front of us, and the moment of ecstasy, they are about collapsing time, reaching back through the centuries. The <a href="https://deitch.com/new-york/exhibitions/isabelle-albuquerque-orgy-for-ten-people-in-one-body" title="Orgy" target="_blank" rel="noopener">&ldquo;Orgy"</a>&nbsp;is deeply personal, literally 10 self-portraits, but also a historical exhumation, digging up bits of the past and reconfiguring them to form new narratives.
&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t want to fill in the whole picture, you know, because then there&rsquo;s no room to enter it,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;An artwork is quite oppressive when it&rsquo;s completely finished, whereas a Greek sculpture with a missing limb or missing head has so much space for longing. I love that space.&rdquo;

Isabelle Albuquerque's 'Orgy' Amplifies Lost Female Voices

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