Small Town Sex Shop

Due to the process-based nature of the Session program, this project will undergo constant modifications; the features of this page provide accruing information on the project’s developments.

On July 2, Katherine Hubbard and Savannah Knoop will begin work on Small Town Sex Shop, as part of Recess’s signature program, Session. Session invites artists to use Recess’s public space as studio, exhibition venue, and grounds for experimentation.

Over the course of their Session, Hubbard and Knoop will explore connotations of production through a synthesis of clothing-making, sculpture and installation. Perverting streamlined techniques of traditional garment-making determined by functionality and profit, the artists will scramble logics of efficiency in favor of excess and pleasure.

The accumulation of goods made in the space will begin to articulate a storefront; divisions will emerge from various materials in tension with themselves. With a carnivorous routine application of labor the structures that build the space initially will become the very forms that adorn the body.

The artists will work towards a collection of first samples, the phase within the design process when a garment transitions from it’s bastard self into a reproducible form. This work will use various techniques and explorations to produce sculptural forms made in relation to the body. These will be on view alongside a growing collection of modular straps made in multiple.

The strap pieces are intended to be worn in combination with street clothes and other experimental forms made throughout the Session. Visitors to the space will be encouraged to try on straps. However, wearability is not the primary concern of the work. The strap becomes a proposition: the mediator of boundaries and comfort as it binds the viewer’s body to the work.

Small Town Sex Shop considers notions of context— upon walking through the door of the “sex shop” in a “small town”, individuals can jettison their public identities in favor of a sexual sociality, obliging the roving body as it engages with it’s own shapes and desires.

The Session will culminate in the opening of a “store” in which visitors can try on and wear the straps and samples. Small Town Sex Shop makes room for inventive moments and awkward intimacy in the face of New York’s reliance on privatization.

Session invites artists to use Recess’s public platform to combine productive studio space with dynamic exhibition opportunities. Sessions remain open to the public from the first day of the artist’s project through the last, encouraging sustained dialogue between artists and audiences. Due to the process-based nature of Session, projects undergo constant revision and the above proposal is subject to change.