Ryann Donnelly, Body High: Death, Drugs, & Eva Hesse

In Body High, the introduction to lurid sculptural practices from the 1960s and the author’s own experience in proximity to opiate use will be used to offer a surreal and unsettling, yet seductive landscape where wider universal themes are explored: How do we medicate ourselves, and why can’t we cure the people we love?

Dripping latex and collapsed rubber tubes were among the provocative materials that signaled an aesthetic turn in European and American sculptural practices starting in the late 1960s. Objects became corporeal: they responded to gravity in ways suggestive of exhaustion, offered sensual form, and confronted viewers with the ephemeral realities of our bodies through viscosity and deterioration.