Common as Mud

Memory is bodily, like an organ that doesn't cohere, dispersed across pressure points, toes and fingers, energetic encounters, and spaces of absence. A memory is not a representation so much as a material imprint of working through the thing. While assuming the form of an object or image, it is the process of the working through—and the feeling through—that brings together two new bodies of work by Carmen Winant and Carey Denniston in Common as Mud. Denniston's hand-modeled clay forms in Builds (2023) are at once loosely utilitarian and affectionate. In Winant's series A woman in the shape of a monster, a monster in the shape of a woman (2023), the artist considers memory and the related phenomenon of disappearance and reappearance in tender impressions of nude women obscured almost to the point of disintegration. — Margaret Kross