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In Anna Sew Hoy’s work, the body is everywhere, especially where it’s missing — just slyly implied.
The L.A. artist’s recent sculptures at the gallery Various Small Fires join clay, fabric and common objects like safety pins and ping pong balls to defamiliarize the familiar, rendering it uncanny, uncouth. Sew Hoy takes what might be assumed to be binary oppositions — protection and exposure, psyche and skin, mind and material — and crafts them into convincing hybrids. There is much to smile at here, and plenty that swirls, wonderfully unresolved, long after in memory.
Sew Hoy’s allegiances lie with textures of the everyday, things touched and used. Electronics, however, are categorically dismissed, willed into relics. She buries an iPhone and...