Skin

The act of painting engages the artist and the viewer in a very tactile, sensuous relationship with surface—a kind of skin to skin contact. Employing the naked female body as part of the act of making, as the tool, is one of the defining characteristics of the art of Yves Klein. Like Ana Mendieta, however, Cagney claims her own image and the act for herself, asserting her agency.

Cagney pours glue and paint that dry into ‘skins’ that integrate unexpected effects of color and texture that suggest the natural irregular features of human skin–moles, freckles, scars and subtle textural and color variations–now shiny and smooth, now wrinkled and loose, now dry and scaly, coarse or finely pored. ‘Pour art’ is a craft that owes its popularity (primarily among women) to the low bar of skill and low cost of materials required. Cagney appropriates this method for her own pour art (or pore art, or poor art) in a sympathetic gesture to the aesthetic activities of women, often dismissed as less than fine art and consigned to the ghetto of craft.

Works in this series are molded on the actual dimensions of Cagney’s own body, traced in silhouette and consisting of glue and paint pours affixed to clear vinyl sheeting. The ‘skin’ formed in the pours resembles the human--thin, translucent and flexible—and likewise fragile and subject to injury, disease, events like childbirth and surgery, and the inevitable effects of time and gravity. Just like our own hides, they are marked randomly, display subtle, shifting colorations, and are embellished with tufts of hair of various locations, length, volume, texture and hue.

The fragility of these paint and glue skins is key. The delicate pours tear easily, reminding us of of our own vulnerable skin. This wrapping, all of a single piece, and covering the entire surface of the body, is most of what others see of us and inextricably linked to identity.