Freud said that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” But sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s a cock. If Timothy Atticus’s sculptures look phallic, that’s because they’re supposed to look phallic. But they’re not your everyday phalluses. They’re huge but they aren’t hard. They’re carried helplessly across Houston Street. They’re even tied up in the woods and left for dead.

In Unzipped Timothy Atticus presents a difficult truth: the body is an object – not mind, not soul, just meat. The sculptures included in the exhibition evolved from a previous series of suggestive shapes, flesh-colored and full of orifices. These newer objects are more clearly sexed, but still exist somewhere in between. Atticus confronts the limitations of language in describing bodies – in particular these “other” bodies – and challenges the traditional understanding of masculinity through the performances he enacts with them. But Atticus’s work is not performance art. The objects come first.

Atticus creates most of these objects from a kind of vinyl called pleather, which he stuffs with Styrofoam pellets and sews together with an industrial Singer. His choice of materials emphasizes the softness of the forms instead of the hardness we’re used to seeing in porn. But even porn can’t prepare us for the size of these monumental members. Atticus “magnifies parts of the corporeal self” to show the disparity between the real size and perceived importance of the phallus: even the biggest cock is small in comparison to the rest of the body, yet for nearly every male it is the biggest symbol of his manhood. These objects can’t be contained by boxers or briefs: as documented in Sculpture Tour 2010, Atticus parades some of them around downtown Manhattan – on elevators, in crosswalks, on swing sets. Others are alone in the woods, sunbathing on seashores, or bound and gagged against trees. With these actions, Atticus unzips the fly and lets the objects – and the questions they raise – all hang out.

Unzipped is Atticus’s second solo exhibition with BENT and will include a series of four recent sculptural projects, accompanied by photographs recording the artist’s interaction with these objects and others, including Sculpture Tour, which now exists only in documentation.

Timothy Atticus was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1987 and raised in West Virginia before moving to Seattle. He has studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and Cooper Union School of Art, and has had solo exhibitions in both Seattle and New York, including Digestive Tracts at BENT, in 2010. His work includes painting and performance, but of late he has focused on sculpture, primarily in pleather. Atticus has lived and worked in the East Village of New York City since 2007.

BENT was founded in 2010 to connect new artists to new audiences in New York City.

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