Works by Nancy Cohen, Marisa Tesauro and Austin Thomas

Curated by Jeannine BardoOpening Reception: Friday, February 25th, 7-9 PM

Life as art, art as life

Limb/ swish- a bodily movement, maybe for walking or dancing.

Limbs/ wish- the body hoping, desiring

A curtain tassel used as an ornament for dress.A curtain tassel worn at the hip that moves with the body and swishes over limbs.

limb/ swish.

A curtain tassel moving with a body through space, an adornment creating sound, moving in sounds of swish, entering beyond the ordinariness of just being an object.

limbs/ wish.

A curtain tassel added to a pedestal, hanging from a hook and surrounded with a metal spiral

A curtain tassel made into an enduring object

A work of art

Limbswish

A pioneer of the “ready-made” art object, the German avant-garde, Dadaist artist and poet Elsa Hildegard Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) was the creator of Limbswish (1917-18) Loringhoven's sculpture Limbswish exemplifies the artist's practice of incorporating found objects into her everyday dress, thus collapsing the distinction between life and art. The curtain tassel which hangs within the core of Limbswish's metal spiral was sometimes worn at the hip by the Baroness as she paraded about in the streets. The title of the work is itself a poetic pun referring to the movement it made when worn as an adornment (limb/swish, limbs/wish). (1)

The artists of Form Re-Formed bring form to life as art in their everyday. Like Loringhoven in spirit, albeit less performative, Cohen, Tesauro and Thomas create art from “ordinary articles of life”. They are bodies and minds moving, mining and musing through life, creating new forms from the by-products of life in the human sphere. They are bodies and minds on notice, critiquing, alerting, archiving, hoping, desiring and embodying life as art and art as life, creating works of art that are themselves condensed forms of the moments of each artists’ lived life.

1. Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. 2022. TheArtStory.org
   Content compiled and written by Laura Hillegas
   Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Valerie Hellstein
   Available from: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/von-freytag-loringhoven-elsa/
   First published on 02 Nov 2017. Updated and modified regularly
   [Accessed 16 Feb 2022]