June Crespo’s solo show at Secession presents a series of works that challenge sculpture’s capacity to record feelings and sensations and produce unusual associations between the architectural space and the body. The references to the interstitial spaces of architecture, and to what is concealed therein, weave a web of associations between the tectonic and the physiological, blurring the lines between the organic and the industrial. With regards to the processes of Crespo’s sculptural practice, then, to make a distinction between house and body, or rather, perhaps, between flesh and stone, misses the point. Instead, the mixing of such motifs reflects the artist’s urge to question this compartmentalization.

Crespo’s sculptures are built from industrially produced elements such as ducts or large textile pieces that are a reference to the outer skins of buildings and their systems of conduction, evacuation, and climatization. When attached to the wall or built into the ground, these systems function like extensions of the body.

On the other hand, organic elements like flowers, which take up a central space in her recent works, are transformed by using high-tech systems of production and representation that sever these plants from any kind of natural order. Thus, the mannequins and the ducts, the toilets and the flowers, all show how the artist explores a type of object-body in transit, which, after it has been broken down, rejects any fixed identity, any gender and even meaning. This approach does, however, propose different ways for sculpture and bodies to relate to each other.

With marked changes in scale and the use of molds, fragmentation, and iteration, Crespo’s sculptural language amalgamates procedures that function as an effective strategy for abstraction, allowing her to play around with the meanings attributed to materials, motifs and artistic techniques.

June Crespo’s sculptures present the act of seeing and the act of doing as linking practices, as engaged forms of action that are committed to an urge for transformation. This urge is reaffirmed in the conviction that the body cannot be defined based on its value as an undivided unit, but rather that its fragmented condition must be addressed. The estrangement, and the analogies with the body, are presented in Crespo’s practice as tools that allow for sculpture’s unstable condition to be dealt with. Sculpture, for the artist, is an exercise sustained over time that only crystallizes in movement and change.