Lot 226: NIKKI LUNA

NIKKI LUNA B. 1977 COMFORTER SIGNED ON THE REVERSE RESIN 200 by 136 by 11 cm.; 78 3/4 by 53 1/2 by 4 1/4 in.

The idea lies beneath this blanket, the unseen bed. The private struggles in this invisible space--that of sanctioned sexuality in the name of intensification of family, and the guilty liberties outside this "economy of pleasure"--are mapped in every crease and fold of the pristine sheets. Always working intricately within the system as a captive body, as woman, Nikki Luna complies that this sacred space should not be made public. Instead, however, she removes its cover and displays this fragment for a cathartic exhibition. Luna has casted her comforter in resin and rendered it useless. Stripped of its softness, both literally and figuratively, what she has now is an idea voided. The gritty details have been polished off this artifact of domesticity. The streamlined simplicity displays a tempered tenderness and trauma. Those who had lain had gone but their bodies have left grooves, tracing an implicit geography of desire and, ironically, its tangible absence. The artist simultaneously takes herself and this fabric out of the context of the sexed bed, a tedious process she captures in a heaving amoebic white plastic sculpture, contorted as if in a violent thrashing rendered in complete silence, in both grief and relief.

- Adjani Arumpac