Besotted
Torey Akers

GALLERY III

August 3 – September 1, 2024

Opening reception: Saturday, August 3, from 6–8pm

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Besotted, an exhibition of sculptural drawings and a textile-based installation by artist Torey Akers. This is Akers’s first solo exhibition in New York City. 

Besotted interrogates desire in its manifold material and affectual iterations, centering want to unearth historically buried expressions of intimacy. Akers engages gesture and line to evoke unruly sensuality and ask larger questions about what it means to yearn in the age of digital communication. 

Akers’s drawings reimagine the Renaissance-era erotic nude—simultaneously coy and brazen, exploited and self-assured—by transforming awkwardness into familiarity through the specter of touch. Less invested in the gender binary or corporatized notions of “body positivity” than moved by compositional reflection on the human condition, Akers positions her drawings as forms of devotion, attention, and destruction unto themselves. 

Besotted braids together four separate strains into a single body of work. The first collection of nine small, irregular drawings—affectionately called “goobers”—explores feminine monstrosity through the language of sketching, forming immediate emotional estuaries to the deep well of embodiment. Three larger drawings with pin-encrusted frames depict the aggregative, obsessional nature of lust. The third component of the show, a suite of mid-size, fine-line drawings, considers the performativity of desire, inviting the viewer to think about the bedroom sanctum as a digital theater for self-discovery. The final piece in the exhibition, a ten-foot chiffon banner depicting a vivisected body disappearing into a pool of black ooze, comments on the furious ephemerality of bodily experience.

Torey Akers is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in Painting from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and has been an artist-in-residence at Mass MoCA, Penland School of Craft, Vermont Studio Center, AIR Studios Paducah, and, this autumn, at Surf Point. She has shown her work all over the country, most recently at LockerRoom Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. www.toreyakers.com @gertnice_gertrude 

View the Press Release here.

Photography: Matthew Sherman