The Brooklyn Rail

Amy Butowicz’s nine large-scale drawings now clipped to the wall at Peninsula feature hands, feet, and other less identifiable body parts pressing into or encircling each other like the doubled-over folds of stretched putty. Clearly a thematic of touch is at play, but in a way different from the artist’s earlier work, which was more squarely abstract or else alluded to nature, design history, or aspects of human form alone. In a crucial development, several works at Peninsula, by contrast, include horse anatomy, primarily hooves and haunches. Two pairs of the former project into the upper register of Groundwork (all works 2023) in an X configuration, while a third in dark, peony-pink gouache curves downward, as would a tail, from highly-modeled equine hindquarters or a fragment of its knee. This body of work, then, extends into new territory, pushing off from Butowicz’s smart “Fishers Island” drawings (2022), which explored the phenomenological principle of chirality—a non-hierarchical conception of touch engendered by two hands touching each other. In these drawings, which are not on view here, sumi ink lines and bulbous protrusions extend outward from a single central spine, as if to suggest the (at least) two-sidedness of any relation. But while the “Fishers Island” drawings relied on a principle of vertical stacking, here forms are jumbled in a chaos of contact reminiscent of Picasso’s interwar canvases, like Guernica (1937), with their collage-like formal displacements. Like that painting, the relations of the drawings Butowicz has brought together for Rapture in the Fold are intersubjective and interspecies.

In conversation, the artist observed that we feel our connection to the physical world through our hands and feet, by walking, touching, and in the postures we hold. Surely this is true for Butowicz in the studio, where she/they straddles the three-foot wide piece of paper laid on the floor by stretching, squatting, or folding themself above it to paint in nothing less than an act of athletic endurance. The feet of Unbounded (in the Marrow) are active: they swing, arch, or tap tap tap on someone else. Meanwhile, the upside-down footprint—a depiction, not an actual index—along the central axis of Loose Footing thematizes the somatic pressure felt between the artist and their materials, as both of these press and sweep across the paper. Yes, this is about a process and sensation of making that is particular to Butowicz’s experience in the studio. But the drawings are also about shared (if not quite universal) understandings of feeling and relating, of how we interface with other things and beings all the time. Because human and equine bodies are fragmented, we can’t actually name or identify them as individuals—they retain the element of fluidity that persists until concepts settle into language. Appendages slip around, adhere, disengage, and reverse in rhizomatic rather than linear patterns of double sensation, a strategy just as queer as it is feminist. The inclusion of horses, then, seems to salute nature in an ecofeminist critique of ossified norms (about human domination over nature, about patriarchy) as much as, in a newly autobiographical dimension of their work, it honors Butowicz’s own past as a competitive equestrian. Decades of riding taught Butowicz that horses are so sensitive to touch that they often respond to tensions or shifts in the rider’s body that the rider may not even notice.

By holding together humans and nature—both representationally and conceptually—Butowicz’s new works also open onto the disruption of other asymmetric binaries underpinning western intellectual thought, particularly the opposition of body and mind. For instance, Butowicz replaces the mastery of vision (long associated with the rational mind) with the felt memory of touch (associated with the fleshy body) by using clear wax to make some of their first marks. Invisible to the eye before Butowicz washes another medium over it, the wax line will later appear white against a colored field. The hatched swathes in Ripening or the rotund cloven hooves rendered as a continuous line in Foothold in this manner arrest the intellect’s intervention in the act of making.

Butowicz also foregrounds touch by selecting tools for applying paint (sticks, shells, crab claws, and feather quills found outdoors) based on how they feel in the hand, rather than because of the type of mark they make. If touch is one way to challenge centuries of sedimented thinking, the drawings both instantiate this self-reflexively in their making and depict it, in what I can only see as representations of body parts wrapped in skin—that is to say, seen from the outside. Here we find a decisive contrast with much of Butowicz’s other work, which makes anatomy simultaneously legible in terms of internal bodily cavities and winding organs. Ultimately it is through the Rapture in the Fold drawings’ turn toward this thematic of externalization that the artist reaches, cogently, to envision a fundamental reorganization of the structures of thought that govern us, and that we in turn govern.