The figure is one of the most recognizable forms in art history. Throughout time, artists have used depictions of the body to confront humanity, channeling both desire and anxiety. As artistic movements and cultural zeitgeists shift, the figure has gone through cycles of presence and absence. There are moments when it has been decidedly marginalized, when its rendering, as image or object, has seemed retrograde, or even “heretical.” (1) Today, with the ubiquity of new technologies that redefine the ways in which our bodies interface with reality and present new possibilities of existence, the figure has re-emerged with a sense of urgency. (2) This feeling of approaching a threshold also causes backward glances at the profusion of styles, conventions, and iconography from art history and popular culture, which artists mimic, blend, and confound.

Across a wide range of mediums and genres, the nine artists in Stranger explore the body as a powerful and perplexing vessel. Together they convey a deep sense of time, spanning the past, present, and future, with references ranging over ancient relics, classical portraiture, and digital avatars. Though the figures appear vaguely familiar at first, this recognition fades, only serving to heighten the elusive nature of these fragments, shape-shifters, and uncanny stand-ins. While evoking our own memories and dreams, they also push back, asserting personality and an autonomous place in the world. Through the aesthetic potential of encounter—meeting another presence on the canvas, pedestal, or screen—each work reveals a different aspect of how we locate ourselves in the world. These strangers prompt us to reflect on our own physicality and continually evolving (and dissolving) notion of being.

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(1) James Lingwood, “After the Fall: The Re-emergence of the Figure in Sculpture,” The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture, ed. Ralph Rugoff (London: Hayward Publishing, 2014), 35.

(2) As curator Ralph Rugoff has written, “It is tempting to say that we are in the midst of yet another figurative ‘revival.’” Rugoff, “The Human Factor,” The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture, 9.

Excerpted from “Stranger,” Stranger, moCa Cleveland, 2016.