Nina Levy
Born 1967, Los Angeles, CA
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
Big Baby, 2003, cast polyester resin, Fiberglas, automotive paint, 83" x 58" x 54", Lent by the Artist
Nina Levy was commissioned to create Big Baby for the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT. At the time, the Aldrich Museum was beginning renovations to their building and thought that this outdoor sculpture appropriately symbolized the “rebirth” of their new structure. Now located on DeCordova Museum's Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Roof Terrace, Big Baby greets visitors immediately as they step out of the elevator onto the roof.
Levy has addressed a seemingly harmless subject, a baby, and transformed it into one of her menacingly delightful and confrontational sculptures. The overwhelming scale of this work makes it impossible to ignore and represents the demanding, self-centered nature of infants. Big Baby's facial expression and physical gesture can be read in a number of ways, perhaps as that of surprise, or as a tense moment before a tantrum, evoking a feeling of anxiety as the viewer imagines the proportionately loud cry that could burst forth from such a huge infant. With sardonic humor, Levy has created a colossal baby that is decidedly not cute, but monstrous.
Levy's process is complex, and it requires a significant amount of time for the artist to complete her works. Each sculpture begins with a clay model over a Styrofoam core from which a plaster mold is formed. The mold is then divided into sections, taken apart, and the Styrofoam is scooped out from the interior of the mold. After the mold is hollowed, a polyester resin and fiberglass composite is cast. Once this cast has hardened, the individual pieces of the sculpture are fitted together with more of the polyester-fiberglass mixture. The plaster is then chipped away, the edges smoothed, and automotive paint is applied to the surface of the sculpture.
Nina Levy
Born 1967, Los Angeles, CA
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
Headlong, 1999, resin, steel, automotive paint, 84" x 28" x 37", Lent by the Artist
Joined by Big Baby, Headlong is one of two sculptures by Nina Levy located on the Museum's Roof Terrace. Levy created these sculptures at different times and did not intend for a narrative to arise between them, but situated together on the roof, these works form a humorous relationship. Poised to hurl its own detached cranium over the edge of the Roof Terrace, Headlong's nude female figure has lost its mind.
Levy plays with the proportion and configuration of the human form in her sculptures, detaching body parts so that each appears as a distinct entity. The artist toys with the notion that neither body nor head may be necessary to one another in order to be visually defined as a whole—that each part is intrinsically independent. Levy seeks to determine whether "certain additions or subtractions to the human body might make metaphorical, or even practical, sense. [She is] interested in how the body can be monstrous and appealing at the same time." Headlong achieves this duality by maintaining almost all normal human features. The nude female form displays sufficient human attributes to be pleasing to the eye, but it is simultaneously disturbing and repulsive due to its detached head.
The artist typically uses herself as a model for her figures. She explains: "I use my own head and body as source material. I am interested in treating myself as a stand in for an "everyman" or perhaps an "every woman", and am not interested specifically in sculptures or photographs as portraits of an individual." Clever and comic, Levy's sculptures challenge traditional notions of beauty associated with the female form in their bizarre and unnatural disjunctions.
