Ligia Bouton, Hybrids, stills from film. Courtesy of the artist.

Ligia Bouton: hybrids
August 11 – October 14, 2006 @ BMoCA

Ligia Bouton combines sculpture, performance, digital video, and photography to produce projects that wrestle with issues of functionality and narrative. Many of her works draw on sources from art history, classical and contemporary literature, and science. By appropriating, translating, or reenacting the narratives she culls from these sources, Bouton introduces issues of metamorphosis through fundamental transformations of the body. Sometimes bodies are changed through costume; in other pieces a radical change of environment can enact a metamorphosis upon the body, and sometimes the body is simply cloned so that the individual must face herself. The desire to “try on” different identities does not equate itself in this work with a need to become someone or something else. In fact, it is just the opposite; by recreating or enacting these roles an awareness of the body’s boundaries surface, along with a greater understanding of exactly what makes one’s body separate from everything else.

Over the past few years, Ligia Bouton’s work has been shown internationally and throughout the United States. The artist received her MFA from Rutgers University in New Jersey and currently lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Most recently her projects have been shown in Santa Fe at EVO Gallery, at the Museum of Fine Arts, and at the Santa Fe Art Institute. Past projects have been shown in New York at Bill Maynes Gallery and at Denise Bibro Fine Art, in Colorado at the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, and in New Jersey at City Without Walls. Her video work has been included in several festivals, including the Female Avant Garde Festival in Prague and Nightworks in New Orleans.