CORPUS is pleased to announce the opening of the gallery’s eponymous debut exhibition, featuring works by Malcolm Bradley, Lisetta Carmi, CJ Mahony, Katie Shannon, Zoe Williams, and Joseph Yaeger.

The body is the site of perception, power, identity, and transformation. It is humanity’s vehicle to experience the world, simultaneously liberating and constraining. To have a body is to feel pleasure and pain, desire and disgust, strength and weakness. It is host to the full scope of human feeling, emotion, and experience. CORPUS brings together six artists whose work turns towards this multifaceted, contested subject that has consumed artists, writers, and theorists across generations.

Through painting, sculpture, and photography, the exhibition spans from the utopian potential of bodies in space captured in Katie Shannon’s meticulous drawings that depict transient moments of nightlife euphoria, to the morbid, highly aestheticised photographs of sarcophagi by the late Lisetta Carmi. Shannon’s drawings are based on stills of archival, lo-res video footage shot by the artist. The characteristically slow, meditative process of building up layers of coloured pencil on paper sits in opposition to the dynamism of the scenes Shannon depicts. Carmi’s photographs at first register as documentary in nature; however, upon closer scrutiny, they reveal themselves as richly layered images that explore the complex power dynamics at play within the patriarchal, bourgeois society of 1960s Italy.

Joseph Yaeger and CJ Mahony have devised unique approaches to exploit the materiality of their respective mediums. The thickly applied gesso of Yaeger’s paintings mimics the slight imperfections and blemishes ever-present in skin. The vicissitudes of the watercolour pigment applied in thin, translucent washes contrast with the corporeality of the gesso below. Mahony’s sculptural works consist of plasterboard pierced and embossed by the artist. This labour-intensive, iconoclastic gesture, combined with dichromatic film, is activated by the shifting light of the day, resulting in ethereal reflections that traverse through space.

Zoe Williams’ Fondant series of photographs are rooted in desire and excess. Leather, glass, silk, skin, and lipstick collide, drawing upon deep-rooted carnal desires embedded in our collective consciousness. Malcolm Bradley’s jewel-like photographic panels consist of imagery taken by the artist in the often overlooked moments of the everyday. Bradley’s work aims to create a vocabulary for the wordless parts of lived experience, pointing to something slight and uncredited in how our subjectivity is shaped through day-to-day, unseen moments.

The picture that emerges from the exhibition is not comprehensive or conclusive, but rather relishes in the fragmentary and indeterminate nature of subjectivity. In bringing together these distinct yet resonant practices, CORPUS celebrates the multiplicity of bodily experiences and encourages viewers to confront what it means to inhabit, appreciate, or endure one’s own body.