UMOCA | Aloe Corry: Loose Limbs

We are tossed by a torrent,

limbs swaying, straining against floods

—ankles, palms, and thighs.

Branching and burned out, measured and weeping.

When the wind blows, we bend, break, and bow.

We flex or are ripped out, roots and all.

For the series, Loose Limbs, artist Aloe Corry draws fragmented bodies, vulnerable to the inevitability of mortality and the tension between wounds and mending. Using the language of a tree as a metaphor for the human form, Corry looks to the ways both the environment and the body are vulnerable to outside forces. Within deep red and purple backgrounds, figures oscillate between body and bough. Like exoskeletal otherworldly creatures, disembodied limbs stir–ribbed legs stumbling, arms growing out of a root ball of abstraction, torsos twisting like tree trunks, hinged jaws opening wide stacked on vertebrate bones. Surreal and uncanny, these anatomies move, functioning wholly independently within a world of magic realism.

Supported by ZAP, and George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation.