FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Magnan Projects presents its 2005 summer show, Liquid Bodies, introducing a new group of seven young women artists, giving audiences a taste of its upcoming fall season of exciting one-person exhibition projects. Liquid Bodies suggest both summer heat and flexible flow. The combination reads as elusive intimacies, mutable selves, and unapologetic play with materials.

Constance Brady quietly reclaims the body in harrowing ways. Her emotional portraits, painted and carved on embedded sheetrock, are incredibly physical and impossible to ignore, pulling our eyes out.

Vanessa Davis, of comic book fame, shares the many transformations of young women’s bodies, secretly confiding with each other over virtual dates, e-mail dreams, and cell phone fantasies.

Tammie Engelhart works beyond found objects, recycling the stuffing of things. Her window installation suggests a home that has exploded, as she salvages an unrecoverable domestic skin, with no pretension of future normality.

Melissa Messina hints at the relationship between women’s bodies and the medical establishment. Her jellies suggest sterile laboratory cultures individualized through innocent secretions. Her drawings look like harmless ice crystals, even though they were created with various medicines.

Daphane Park imagines other worlds to escape to and their many intriguing inhabitants, morphing and stretching their forms for the viewer.

Maya Onoda presents map-like shimmering drawings hanging as fragile tapestries, chartering childhood imagination, traditional Japanese domestic crafts and mother-daughter experiences, and her nomadic life as an artist.

Jessica Watson has an intelligent photographic eye, and though it purposefully stops short of sensually wallowing in the mud with her subject, it takes us there and makes us wonder about all skin and the purely tactile.

Liquid Bodies was guest-curated by Ernesto Pujol.