Torso

M Acuff

October 3 - October 18, 2020

Opening Reception

Saturday, Octoberber 3rd, 2020
6:00–9:00pm

Open Hours

Fri-Sun 12-5pm
or by appointment

Email Visit@carnationcontemporary.com
to schedule a visit

Exhibition Statement

In the exhibition Torso, Acuff employs myth, movement and material to inhabit cultural territories previously occupied exclusively by white, male bodies. Mining historical and contemporary representations of masculinity--especially those in which violence, racism and ecocide reside, Acuff reconfigures archetypes of the heroic, positing transness as a space in which the figurative dutifully trumps the literal. In a series of short lecture/performances, Acuff animates discreet objects and texts, building forms of feminist, queer, and trans imagination that resist the reification of hegemonic masculinity.

Bio

M Acuff’s artistic practice thinks in the spaces between object, history, material and image. In an effort to harness the intelligence of the body, alongside that of the hand and mind, they work to situate making as a riddle; materials allude, occlude and conspire, resist and deflect. Acuff is increasingly attuned to the ways power and privilege are inscribed in the objects and images that surround them. In this sense, artmaking has become a way for them to reckon with the long shadows of history that bleed into the present, and a means to assert alternative ways of thinking and being.

In recent years Acuff has exhibited their work nationally in group and solo exhibitions across the country at venues such as Carnation Contemporary, 3S Artspace, the Jundt Museum, White Box, The Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Woman Made Gallery, AIR Gallery, and the Attleboro Museum of Art. Acuff has been the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant, a Mississippi Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, and has been awarded fellowships at many artist residencies throughout the United States including Signal Fire, Djerassi, The Arctic Circle, Jentel, Ragdale, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Acuff is an Associate Professor of Art at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA.