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The Wandering Womb, a show opening at Pearl District gallery the Lumber Room this Saturday (reception 4–7pm October 11; thru January 31), takes its title from ancient pseudoscience. In 360 BCE, Plato called the womb “the animal within.” The archaic claim, which echoed into modern times, was that the uterus, this animal within an animal, would move throughout the body and inflict—what else?—that great agent of misogyny, hysteria. Exploring the topic today, reframed as a subject of transformation and introspection, the gallery has paired several works by the French American artist Louise Bourgeois, who died in 2010, with sculptures and drawings by LA-based artist Isabelle Albuquerque. 

Bourgeois was revered for her simultaneous depiction of organic life and the structures that confine and oppress it, reveling in messiness and commenting on subjugation in the same breath. Her work spanned subject matters and mediums, though her “alternately architectonic and fleshy figures,” in the words of New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, might be most evocative. Often, these busts and disembodied appendages carried traces of autobiography, but her work, when not fully abstract, almost always stretched at least a little past the bounds of material reality.

Albuquerque’s sculptures are more literal—actually, they’re extremely literal. She’s best known for Orgy for Ten People in One Body, a series of headless sculptures made from computer scans of her own body which are then reproduced in various materials. Several are outfitted with fur and resemble sexualized, humanoid animals. One, of a woman on all fours cast in rubber and resin, inspired the title of Miranda July’s latest novel, which was dedicated to Albuquerque. Another is a bronze of a woman riding a broom. “I really wanted to create a witch who was pure ecstasy and magic,” Albuquerque has said of the sculpture, “but it also had to speak to the fact that these women historically were burned.” The resulting sculpture is an ecstatic figure burnished with ash. 

Across time, technologies, and distinct visions of what their own human experiences look like, both artists’ work pursues the duality of uninhibited, raw experience and the ways forces outside our control affect it. 

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