Christina Dy's practice, spanning a decadeor so, seem to evolve around feats of endurance and feats of physical strains. They evidence a series of calculated performative acts that veer on the ritualistic and the hermetic. The drawings serve as a record keeping of the hours and days spent, itbears being the sole witness to a back breaking effort in completing them. Here a surface of charcoal transforming by foot space to a massive terrain of hair, to a whirlpool of clouds, to a carpet of rippling ocean waves, blanketing an eremite’s cubic island. It’s a physicality buttressed on magnanimity, pitting scale with the limits of materiality and human frailty. Paper and flesh, pulp and bones, contained or contorted, folded or unfurled, analogies contrasted with the wielder and her material, with object and subject converging into form. A series of these actions fan out as shaded creases, invoking rocks, butterfly wings, petals, clothing, muscles, ligature, epidermis. She draws out the exhaustion with her body as form, body as tool, body as machine, body as ground, body as a delineation of topography of interpersonal relationships as it traverses with other bodies, body as a trace of a precise choreography and rigid routine. As paper folds and fans out into valley and mountains, to pleats or creases, body contorts into poses – sitting, standing, lying, kneeling, crouching, a panoply of micro movements that clamber up into a heroics of exertion battling vastness and particularities, limits and endlessness, infinity scaled to mathematical configurations, a plane’s perspective multiplied into tesseracted Eschers.
