UNM art graduate student Tracy Stuckey is very concerned with the human body, formally and conceptually.
In his show opening this Friday, "Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy," Stuckey will show just how interested he is in the body with his oil paintings of skin, and what lies beneath it - raw meat.
"The meat was basically a way to do painting related to the body but more indirectly," Stuckey said. "It was an obnoxious idea. I always try to create a little tension, a push and a pull."
Stuckey's paintings do just that.
This body of work is aesthetically beautiful, but in some ways, very frightening. Skin is being pulled this way and that, raw muscle tissue is juxtaposed alongside the human forms and the flesh on bodies is not smooth but lumpy and meaty.
"It's an overwhelming feeling." Stuckey said, "You want to step closer, but it's a little confronting in a way."
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The confrontation doesn't stop with the subject matter. The large format of the pieces, at least 4 feet by 4 feet, also adds to the experience. Although the bodies are not presented in a traditional way, there is a lot of sensuality in the paintings.
Most of the bodies are nude and missing their heads, leaving their identities behind. Stuckey said the people are not what his work is about.
"The paintings are not about identity, but rather an investigation as to what we really are. We are all just meat and flesh," he said in his artist statement.
Although it's a little painful to look at Stuckey's work, it's also painful not to. Just viewing Stuckey's piece of a child with his bottom lip stuck in a glass bottle makes viewers feel like their own lip is stuck in the bottle, and they can practically taste the glass. This child's face is next to some raw meat so real looking it is almost tangible.
By the time Stuckey's audience has been through his entire show, onlookers have likely been able to engage every one of their senses. And he does all this without even using a brush.
Stuckey paints his canvases with small squares of matte board, and the result is texturally rough, but very precise. As for how this all began, Stuckey said: "I really wanted to do something that dealt with the body. I wanted it to be a sensual experience, and I wanted to paint the image in a way that enhanced the senses."
