Group Motivation
Eve Ackroyd & Kara Rooney

December 16, 2017 – February 4, 2018

Cindy Rucker Gallery is pleased to present Group Motivation, an exhibition featuring works by New York based artists Eve Ackroyd and Kara Rooney. This exhibition explores the body as a vehicle for expression, restriction, politics, and individual and collective freedom.

Eve Ackroyd’s paintings depict women’s figures in intimate, colorful surroundings. Their bodies stretch energetically to fill the confines of each canvas; caged in stretch, awaiting the breakout moment. Clouds and the surrounding outside world encroach on the pulsing, sentient bodies that exude a sense of confidence and preparation, ready for a decisive moment of strength. Shadows ripple through the paintings like visible traces of where the body has been. Both delicate and anchored in reality, they serve as reminders of how bodies negotiate space.

Kara Rooney's Hydrocal and resin sculptures inscribe the body through gestural absence. Implied in their surfaces and human scaled forms is the spectre of movement, left as a residual echo from the works' utilization in the artist's multidisciplinary performances and collaborative actions. The barrier motif, in particular, references the multitudinous directionalities of perspective--its task is to mark and in movement, negotiate the problematic dualisms of inclusion/exclusion, presence/absence, feminine/masculine, movement/stasis, self/other. As demarcations or thresholds that can be traversed, moved, or penetrated by the body, these objects act as visual semaphores for the expansion of language and meaning in general, the definition of which is open-ended, fluid, fragile.

“EVE ACKROYD & KARA ROONEY: Group Motivation”, The Brooklyn Rail, Kaitlyn A. Kramer, February 4, 2018. Download PDF.

“Eve Ackroyd’s Paintings and Kara Rooney’s Sculptures Stage an Artists’ Duel Over Ideas of the Body—See Them Here”, artnet News, Tanner West, January 22, 2018. Download PDF.