Soloway Gallery is pleased to present Skeleton Pants, a group exhibition featuring 16 artists working in sculpture, painting, drawing, and video. Skeleton Pants is the second curatorial collaboration of artists Orli Swergold and Nicole Schonitzer and the gallery’s first ever double feature exhibition, using both the main gallery and the building’s neighboring ground floor space.

Skeleton Pants literally describes an interior structure and its shell with no body to hide. The curators explore this idea along with a multitude of paradoxes and synchronisms that can be drawn from this phrase. Considering the function or lack of function of Skeleton Pants brings forth the central concerns of the exhibition. Are Skeleton Pants a covering without nakedness or for the ultimate nakedness? Is it scandalous to expose one’s skeleton? What is the point of a protective layer for something already hard or a shield that offers no actual protection from breakage? Are the Skeleton Pants doomed to fall down or are they held up by invisible flesh? Or is our visible flesh actually just pants for our skeleton? What fills the nothingness between a skeleton and its pants? Lastly, we can imagine Skeleton Pants embodied, as a neighborhood character that strolls down your street. Who wouldn’t delight in the vision of Skeleton Pants at their door? They straddle life and death, embodying the humor that’s born from the morbid.

The artists in Skeleton Pants mine these questions and this imagery using diverse materials, techniques, and forms and by employing a variety of styles and tones from realistic to abstract, figurative to conceptual, humorous to horrific, intimate to distant. They address and complicate a range of supposed poles: covering and revealing, life and death, presence and absence, normal and abnormal, other and self. Myriad cultural touchstones can be found in the works, such as the gothic, costuming, the magical, and the abject. We invite viewers to enter Skeleton Pants with radical openness, to sit in the in-between of the skeleton and its pants or to charge past the pants right to the heart of things.

Thank you to Michael Dispensa for the poster design, to Jeremy Ruiz for the commemorative postcards, and to Emily Wilker for coining “Skeleton Pants”.

-Text by Nicole Schonitzer and Orli Swergold