In Still Curly, Alice Peach presents new sculptures that transform the humble popsicle stick into surprisingly modular formations. The sticks, pale and flat, assume skeletal poses, undulating like the curvature of a spine or the off-kilter construction of a torso. Peach fashions them to the wall, splayed, or suspends them from the ceiling, operating almost as a puppeteer. From each of the popsicle structures extend “spinners,” organic forms made of overlapping boot shapes; a flaneur’s fanciful footwear frozen in motion.
The sculptures corporeal forms are odes to a cast of eccentric characters who surrounded Peach at a young age, personifications of independence, beauty, and wit. Katherine, who would do cold plunges in the ocean, her flaming red lipstick smeared as she emerged fearlessly onto the beach; Sarah, bookish and bold amongst the endless volumes in her intimate home library; and Phyllis, with her two long braids and free-flowing garments, whose own painting hangs just outside the gallery walls, parallel to one of Peach’s drawings. Phyllis Yampolsky, who organized the Hall of Issues exhibition in New York’s famed Judson Church in the 1960s, generating space for political discourse and activism. In each of the popsicle sculptures’ resolute postures lives a tenderly honored muse.
As the sculptures take on the personas and affects of these figures of inspiration, they also evoke forms of bodily containment: corsets, hats, petticoats. Objects that toe the line between the selective adornment of self presentation, and the restrictive tightening of conformity. The etymological crossover between glamour and grammar, both derived from the Scots word glamer–a magic spell or illusion–confirms this duality: on one side, the alluring, quasi-occult power embodied in a muse, and on the other, the strict structures embedded in embodying a symbol of perfection.
In Domenico Modugno’s popular 1950s ballad La donna riccia, he sardonically plays with the double meaning of capriccio, both the curls of a woman’s hair, and her sudden and reactive change in temperament; he warns that in each curl is a caprice, a beauty beguiling enough to entangle you in its spell. Modugno’s song might describe any of Peach’s beloved muses, powerful figures of femininity and resolve–and they in turn would laugh at such trepidation. The popsicle sticks coyly curl into place, embodying the muse’s magic.
