Hannah Levy defamiliarises commonplace objects by warping or exaggerating their formal properties. Levy’s visual vocabulary includes medical equipment, gymnastic devices, safety bars, vegetables, pastries, and pearls. Her objects provoke repulsion and attraction to a humorous extreme. While her linear, metallic forms conjure associations with home or office furnishings, their skin-like sheaths confuse the separation between living and dead, animal and prosthetic. Indebted to the Surrealist fascination with the uncanny and the abject, her work takes an ambivalent view on the past century’s material culture. For The Milk of Dreams, Levy realises three new sculptures: a drooping sac of slumped silicon balanced on four polished metal arthropod-like legs; a thin membrane of silicone stretched over a winged steel structure that is reminiscent of a bat’s wing or a tent; and a over-sized marble facsimile of a peach pit, a material used in craft traditions that contains surprising levels of the poison cyanide. Each takes an ambiguous position between functional furniture and object of aesthetic contemplation, giving corporeal form to the cycles of production, consumption, and disposal that underlie contemporary life.
Ian Wallace