Pacifier — Ali Prosch

Pacifier

Niche Gallery is pleased to present Pacifier, new sculpture and performance works by Ali Prosch. The works in Pacifier aim to synthesize and transform the aggregate of sensations and compulsions Prosch has experienced since becoming a mother in 2019. Each Sunday at 4:30pm and 5:30pm, the artist and Tiffany Sweat will perform the exhibition’s central work, A Series of Movements and Interactions (the spell). Invoking the figure of the witch, the women sift through a complex of nested emotions. This dance ritual occurs in Niche Gallery’s front garden set amongst sculptures from Prosch’s Comfort Objects series. The two giant wax candles cast from the architectural detail of the niche point to Pacifier’s central themes of absence and presence, transfer and condensation, use and misuse.

Coming into relationship with her daughter and pulled into the role of caregiver, Prosch found her own discomforts emerging alongside her duty to comfort another. The mother is in effect asked to be the pacifier, or alternately to supply one. Thinking through the highly designed and mass-produced object version made to soothe a child, Prosch began to devise conceptually parallel, unique and makeshift objects to relieve herself. However, Prosch’s Comfort Objects stem from a curiosity about how to hold space for what is misaligned and act as tools in a regimen of disorder. She considers how the pacifier is an active role, representing the inherent battle of wills between opposing desires and distresses. Her devices exceed the role of maintenance, adding pleasure, escape and resistance to their functions.

In A Series of Movements and Interactions (the spell), the figures conjure tenderness and solidarity, ultimately intended as a soothing balm for the performers and audience alike. The choreography includes synchronized dance, pedestrian movement, improvisation, American Sign Language and gestures inspired by Wiccan practices. In Niche’s interior space is Comfort Object (broomstick), a truncated witch’s broomstick, dripping with a transformative tincture, charged with the ritual’s energy. Beside it, hanging within the niche, Comfort Object (waterbag) shows a tool intended to sanitize, which instead is overcome by the body in the process—expelling, leaking, and spreading. Prosch lets what has been repressed return and populate the work’s surface. It is in such disorder and excess that Prosch finds power. Following her intuition, she devises her own channels for healing, being, and nurturing.