Solar Coochie playfully challenges classical affinities of the feminine with the passive power of the moon, realigning it with the active agency of solar power. Through a grouping of new sculptures and wall works, artists Umico Niwa and Peat Szilagyi investigates cycles of life and energy recentered around flowering and fruiting bodies. Co-opting cultural associations between the floral and female genitalia, and acknowledging their real function as genitals within a heliotropic life-space, the phrase solar coochie is, at its simplest, bawdy slang for flower. Beyond this starting point, however, the exhibition becomes a fulcrum for upending a series of cultural assumptions (particularly Western cultural assumptions) by providing non-deterministic narratives and models of energy exchange, (pro)creation, and, transcendence.
