In her 2017 solo show at Commonwealth and Council, “HERMY,” Young Joon Kwak “claims new history” through labored object-making: the Hermaphroditus sculptures are simultaneously transformative and transcendent, structureless architectures that rise out of the ground, climb walls, that command visibility while resisting “easy definition” (1). The themes in “HERMY” are echoed here in “All Hands On Deck,” a title alluding to the cry elicited on a board ship to gather its crew, often in a state of emergency. Although the image conjures the transoceanic mobility akin to colonial histories, the artists called onto “All Hands On Deck” reclaim the discipline of the nautical crew in an effort to engage a collective, yet granular visibility to resist the regulative, oppressive operations that pervade present and past histories. The call here, however, is not so much a vociferous cry as it is an invitation—a coy extension or seduction of the hand—to meditate, contemplate, accompany the bodies (of work) congregated in this space.

Kwak’s Hermaphroditus’s Reveal I, 2017, placed assuredly near the gallery entrance, introduces the exhibition upon an act of revealing;  hands at each side—both front and back—of the billowed fiberglass hold and pertain delicate gestures of lifting a garment. The motion exposes a mysterious, inconceivable negative space, a body that is at once visible yet illegible. Around the corner, Harry Dodge’s Ideal Genie, 2016, is a “hybrid of disparate materials,” composited to express new, multiple bodies of artificial and mystical connotations (2). The linen, draped over two lumps (?) connected to a protrusive shaft, concealing them, reveals an almost cutesy apparition: the invisible is suddenly made visible, touchable, upon a coalescence of objects—the fluid and the rigid, the organic and the metallic. The base of the sculpture, in its mechanical luster and angularity, conjures the image of a Mars rover, landed cautiously in an unfamiliar terrain, its solar panels, fresh, deployed, basked out in the sun. Here, the man-made, extraterrestrial image (the rover, built on earth, delivered to the red planet) and the supernatural, local image (the ghost, bound to earthly objects, architectures) aggregate a singular anatomy.

Hung on the backside of the next partition, Anna Hew Soy’s Utopic Void, 2017, affects an intimacy of utility: the underbelly of a toilet seat (implied by a flatness, the oblong frame, symmetrical protrusions). It is supported on two resin fingers, bent, as if in the midst of lifting, reorienting a toilet so that it might serve a specific type of purpose or body. The eponymous void is conveyed by the negative space, the hole, through which somatic fluids or appendages (in the functional context) might pass or enter, performing excretion, release (Utopia). The sculpture establishes this relationship—between corporeality and functionality—through its use of absence (Void): the focus becomes the space of mutual contact, an intersection of the body and a device. Near the adjacent wall, Isabell Yellin’s soft sculptures engage leather-bound, fetishistic intimacies. They too explore a similar intersection between the corporeal and the functional, yet here the body converges with a device: the skin becomes indistinguishable from the leatherette, the organ becomes the garment. Darker undertones, suggested by the figures hanged on swing-set chains or prostrated, shriveled upon the ground, are further carried in Orr Herz and Roni Shneior’s Finish The Words From Your Plate, 2015, a ceramic fountain resembling, in its glaze-and-gore, a body, flipped inside-out. Despite the work’s unfortunately morbid disposition, the pump remains activated: one is likely to bitterly chuckle at such a morbid self-preservation.

When the exhibition’s curative effort begins to seem too definitive or segregated (the works are clustered by respective artist and within reason, as the show emphasizes visibility and difference: yet the format can often feel disparate or sterile, lacking in a collaborative entanglement), i encounter Julie Henson’s An Absolute Beast (Julie Johnston), 2017, a collection of hand-shaped wood cutouts pointed up towards the ceiling, connoting the idiom ‘raise the roof.’ Masked over a vivid photograph of a sold-out soccer stadium, the work evokes bodies that engage a collective celebration, possibly of athlete Julie Johnston, who is strategically cropped into the positive space, made visible. Across the room on the opposite wall hangs Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photograph, Mirror Study (4R2A0857), 2016, in which the hand motif, recurring as it has been throughout “All Hands On Deck,” is expressed upon two notations: one, the legible presence of limbs and two, the subtle latencies, finger prints that obfuscate the clarity of the mirror. Unlike Henson, Sepuya indicates the queer body in quieter, concealed fashions. Take the adjacent photograph, Draping [IMG6936], in which a body becomes illegible under a sheet of fabric, but nonetheless, implied, enticing, visible.