Finger Bang

Finger Bang, curated by sculptor Genesis Belanger and painter GaHee Park, surveys the work of 22 living artists who depict fingers and hands to various ends and effects. The results are wide-ranging but all can agree that the hand remains an area to be mined for psychological, sexual, and political meanings. Much of the work in the exhibition is of a surrealist bent and, in keeping with that, bodily imagery pervades. Fingers and hands appear where they shouldn’t be, often severed or separate from their host body.

The history of art is littered with hands. Think of Christ Pantocrator presiding over some crumbling frescoed dome, his peace sign at half-mast. See the saints and their implements—a key, an anchor, a platter of breasts... Hands were the locus of identity. Picture Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam at the Sistine Chapel; Adam, a little limp in the wrist, receives the spark of life from God. Hands giving, hands taking. Art, its religious and didactic functions a thing of the past, is handsier than ever.