The superstitious have been known to bury their fingernails, the heartsick to pluck hairs from their lovers’ heads, believing that this detritus is forever linked to the spirit of the person from whom it came. How does the matter of the body relate to the self? Do we recognize ourselves in our baby teeth, in the film of skin we peel from a sunburn? And what of our living organs? Or our bodily processes—how do they relate to our understanding of what it is to be and to do?

Kristin Reger’s sculptures play with such questions. They evoke the body—tongues, veins, bone, teeth—but these objects appear to have their own creaturely sentience and will, writhing, embracing, and stretching: parts become whole. A menagerie of bodily somethings that dance around our fear of the body’s unpredictability, our understanding that what’s inside of us is so far outside of our control. In creating a universe that is more phantasmal than visceral, one in which the fleshiness of the body is ossified into porcelain and clay, Reger builds a safe space in which to observe our anxiety about death and decay while holding it at arm’s length. But with “Burst,” in which constellations of sinuous porcelain pieces hang from meat hooks and bungie cords like fused bones, the focus is honed on the moment of tension in which the body’s unruliness can no longer be contained. This mid- air orgiastic reverie of worms threatens to fall apart at any moment; the sculptures’ fragility and capacity for reconstruction are evidenced by mutant scars where the porcelain has been repaired with reactive adhesive. The hernia, the slipped disc, the errant tooth breaking through the gum, sickness and, ultimately, death. La burbuja ha explotado. The bubble has burst.

— Erin Sheehy