Pierre Menard Gallery, of Harvard Square, Cambridge is proud to announce “SKIN,” a group exhibition of work by seven female artists employing skin as their primary medium.  Heide Hatry, contributing artist and curator of “SKIN” developed relationships with contemporaries who are using pig-skin as an art medium, and drew attention to their practice with the publication of her book, SKIN (Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2005).  The book reflects on the work of this consanguine group, examines the various methods of the protagonists and the concepts that inform their work, and offers thoughtful critical and academic perspectives contributed by several notable European and American art historians who identify the significance of the work and its allied movement in contemporary art. 

Skin has its obvious functions.  We readily understand its uses in anatomy (nowhere more so than in the currently omnipresent and controversial Body Worlds exhibitions of Guenter von Hagens, who was in fact one of the sponsor of some of the work presented in this exhibition) or as a textile whose uses are virtually endless and thoroughly pervade the man-made environment, but to engage skin as an independent form and an art material is a disconcerting experience.  In fact, at first glance, the work is so powerful, immediate and even shocking that one’s initial response might well be revulsion: wrenching skin from its traditional contexts and uses so that it retains none of its conventional air of utility profoundly summons thoughts of violence and mortality, and we recoil from it.  

Here we contemplate work that has nerve(s) both poetically and literally.  Our own skin is a medium for both sensual and semiotic communication – as such we recognize it as a de facto medium, a site for aesthetic modification as well as multifarious interaction with each other and our environment.  Visually, pig-skin possesses qualities of variation that relate it to our own: minute patterns, wrinkles, teats and veins, all contribute to textures which call not only for a sensual response, but even more appropriately for an intellectual one.  

The works in this exhibition range from two-dimensional images and photographic representation, to three-dimensional sculpture and installation, and video performance.