MICHELE RUSHFELDT

2020 - 2021

Michele Rushfeldt is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Raised in a conservative, Catholic family in suburban Minnesota, much of the artist's work from the past several years pushes back against shame-based ideas of feminine sexuality. After leaving her hometown, she received her B.F.A. in painting from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, followed by her M.F.A. from Pratt Institute in New York. In addition to curating exhibitions around the country, her work has been exhibited for nearly a decade in California, Washington, DC, and New York, and is included in private collections.

Most recently, Rushfeldt’s sculpture was on view in Tilted VisionS at VillageOne Art in New York. In 2021, Cathouse Proper in Brooklyn, NY, presented Rakish Exhibition(ist), which included sculpture by Rushfeldt and a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe.

“My sculptures utilize materials associated with sexuality and kink, and depict how observations of fringe eroticism feel and look. They represent over-performative bodies, depicting a variety of elegant, glittering, dripping, and twisting sculptures and panels - characters in the midst of their sexual ‘acts.’ Materials take on a dominant role. Latex, rope, harnesses, steel, fabrics, and paints create dimensional forms that feel and look like the materials they employ:

stretchy, tense, balancing, caked with glitter, bulging, and translucent. I embrace the humorous and peculiar aspects of voyeurism and exhibitionism, including visuals that suggest skin, bodily fluids, and contorted poses. Each work encapsulates a tense balance, with harder materials hanging on softer ones, and a dependence on the architecture for submissive support.”

- Michele Rushfeldt

“I was a synchronized swimmer, an athlete, for twenty-five years, but also I grew up very Catholic. A lot of the things that I’m thinking about now, and the work that I’m making now, is very much in opposition to my upbringing of Catholicism, and I guess, the shame that comes along with organized religion and how it perceives sexuality…

Red is a color I find myself drawn to quite a lot with the rhinestones and the steel and a more kind of dirty, rust, weld that embodied the kind of dirty beauty that I like to get into.”

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