Maladaptive

Excerpt from Abject Feasts and Eucharistic Lovers at MAMA Projects by Emma Fiona Jones for IMPULSE Magazine

The person we hate we “can’t swallow.”

Nicki Cherry’s Maladaptive elicits an intense awareness of the difference between thirst-quenching and hydrating. The classically-informed, headless nude speaks to the simultaneity of desire and repulsion, the feeling of wanting to crawl out of one’s own skin and into another. A stainless steel spigot punctures the mottled, sandstone-hued flesh between the shoulder blades, with the spine ending in a deep cavity waiting to be filled. The work evokes the extravagantly feminine nudes of another Ni(c)ki, Niki de Saint Phalle, the self-taught French-American artist known for her monumental sculptures and early advocacy of AIDS education. Maladaptive embodies the Satrean longing to inhabit a state of being characterized by pure consciousness, an attempt to flee the perpetual precipice of seeing the self because it is seen by the other.