Cheryl Pope: No Place Better Than The BODY

Easy Does it Curatorial Space Los Angeles, in collaboration with Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, is pleased to present Cheryl Pope: No Place Better Than The BODY. 

Miami- and Chicago-based Cheryl Pope is an interdisciplinary visual artist who questions and responds to issues of identity as it relates to the individual and the community, specifically regarding race, gender, class, history, power, and place. Her practice emerges from the act and politics of listening using a novel material process to explore the artist’s memories. Referencing the familiar repertoire of the French Post-Impressionist, Intimist, and Imagist paintings, Pope recreates deeply personal recollections that cinematically compose the silent complexities of everyday life. Since 2019, Pope’s fabric paintings have surveyed portraits of women in interior spaces, intimate snapshots of the artist’s own relationships, and tender scenes depicting a mother and child. Recently, the artist has returned to her investigations of womanhood and female empowerment, foregrounding the spectrum of bodies seen throughout strip clubs in Miami. Fresh off her debut of this series at Art Basel Miami Beach 2023, No Place Better Than The BODY is the first solo exhibition to showcase this new body of work. 

Pope’s process involves meticulously needle punching single strands of loose wool roving into a stretched cashmere backing, a time consuming and physically demanding practice resulting in works that are simultaneously textural and flat. Compositional elements reference the classic nude, one of the oldest tropes in Western art. But rather than fall in line, Pope breaks away from the “idealized forms” that the art historical canon has prioritized, offering us questions around representation and how we see, know, and celebrate the body. After a move to Miami in 2022, Pope found herself visiting strip clubs learning that these types of spaces were regular haunts on a night out for Miamians. A former golden gloves boxing champion and an avid gym and beachgoer, Pope is no stranger to being in spaces that honor the body and found a special connection to the intimacy of the strip club as a sort of “temple that places you in your body and celebrates the core aspect of what it means to be alive.” Art historian Kenneth Clark writes in his 1956 book The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, “the nude is not the subject of art, but a form of art.” Pope’s figures are a study of the body as a place, expressed through line, pattern, and color. Purposefully designed compositions present full figures in different positions without showing the subjects’ eyes, a way for them to control their visage. Here, strippers exercise their freedom of sexuality, choosing how to use their bodies in interaction with their environment.  

In a world where screen devices dictate our connections and how we perceive the world, Pope’s paintings are built solely from memory. By entering spaces where phones are prohibited, such as the strip club, Pope engages with the process of seeing in its most active form. Her work invites a “layered interpretation,” as described by John Berger in Ways of Seeing, where the act of seeing is as much about understanding and questioning as it is about observing. The visual experience is first felt through the body and the works are a mirroring of Pope’s own reaction as she was currently seeing it. Hyper saturated color combined with perspective distortion conveys a sense of psychological and emotional intimacy. But memories are unreliable, so there is a looseness of what is loved in a moment and what is lost, which can be expressly visualized through the artist’s use of cutting out obvious segments of the works. As a result, the works ask “can a painting tell you anything? Or can you just feel something?” These intimate spatial moments allow the artist to shape reality from memory. No Place Better Than The BODY champions self-defined beauty and empowerment by highlighting the body not just as an object of beauty and sexuality, but for its form and capacity to provoke raw human experiences. 

This fall, Pope’s work will be included in two upcoming group exhibitions exploring the intersection of art and sports:  Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing at the Norton Museum of Art; and Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture at SFMoMA which travels to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Pérez Art Museum Miami.