Clarice Tara Cuda, The Deli

Clarice Tara Cuda, The Deli. Photo Amanda Keating.

by D.K. Sole 

It’s rare for a business in Las Vegas – even a gallery -- to set aside space for an installation. We would owe Recycled Propaganda a debt of gratitude even if The Deli had looked awful. It didn’t. Bathed in pink light, the room felt moist and unreal, an environment on its own terms. Slabs of butcher’s meat loomed from the ceiling, showing their exposed ribs, but the meat and bones were made of hair. White sackcloth hung from hooks. A realistic deli counter had been set up at the back with plaster casts of body parts laid out in rows as if they were food. A blackboard on the wall advertised prices for “mouth, breast, ribs, fist, pussy, dick.” Anyone who had been following Clarice Tara Cuda’s work would have realized that she was fusing several different areas of her practice into a coherent whole. They would have remembered the sackcloth from a BFA midway show, the focus on hair from her final, the interest in damaged flesh from her performances at RADAR and elsewhere. Context seems important. If the work had appeared in a country where saints’ relics were a historical fact, we would have connected the exhibition to martyrdom and faith. Here we come up with a secular interpretation, which is probably going to run along these lines: “The commercial world treats sexual bodies like commodities.” The use of plaster hinted that the body is not harmed by commodification, however. The cold lips and folds looked inedible and replicable. You couldn’t eat the products in this deli but you could smash them. A row of fists protruded from the wall by the door as you came in.

Clarice Tara Cuda, The Deli
Recycled Propaganda, 1114 S Main St Suite 120, Las Vegas, NV 89104
October 19th, 2019 - December 14th, 2019

Australian artist D.K. Sole lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, and works at the UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art where she is in charge of Research and Educational Engagement. She has exhibited in Las Vegas and Denver, Colorado.

Posted by Wendy Kveck December 28, 2019.