I Can Feel
Suzy Kellems Dominik

I Can Feel is a neon sculpture and choreographed light performance. Standing at 12′ tall, the 27.68 second neon performance illuminates the rising emotion and viscerally glorifies the female orgasm in its overt monumentality. Described as a work of emotional autobiography — the artist’s distinct medium that prioritizes first and foremost the lived experience at the genesis of her work — the sculpture’s central feature is a 5’ 3.5” vagina, a number that symbolically represents the artist’s height. The viewer basks in an effusive pink and blue neon glow as the choreography elicits the warmth of human touch and the vindication of emotional redemption. The title of the work describes a self-affirmation, a personal breakthrough experienced in the wake of a mourned relationship, wherein the subject has progressed beyond the stages of grief to proclaim the achievement of self-empowerment and to ultimately embrace both physical and spiritual joy. Despite the overtly-feminine iconography, the work is intended to convey a universal, non-gendered expression of fundamental human needs: the need to communicate, connect, and commune. The artwork is a poetic reclamation of the self.

About the Artist
Suzy Kellems Dominik (b. 1961) is a multi-disciplinary artist and emotional autobiographer known for her fearlessly confrontational work. The deliberately feminist themes she explores are realized through various mediums and serve to dissect the most intimate moments of human relationships. Kellems Dominik seeks to encourage the amplification of strong female voices with a focus on self-empowerment, pleasure, and the private-made-public. Her extensive and varied body of work is underscored by a profound empathy for the vulnerability of the human condition and for the principles that underlie our efforts to connect, communicate, and commune. Kellems Dominik’s work is characterized by her diligent research of our culture’s visual traditions, societal taboos, religious legacy, and the body of the individual. She often uses her own body to expose rigidly antiquated social constructs and to examine the role of female sensuality and agency in subversion of patriarchal social and aesthetic conventions. Drawing on the endlessly expressive qualities of film, performance, photography, and sculpture, Kellems Dominik explores objectification and the male gaze, human trauma, female sexuality, agency, and her own experience of loss and survival.

Driven by a mission to speak to broad and diverse audiences and striving to disrupt the dogmas of the contemporary art market, Kellems Dominik’s work has been exhibited internationally both within and beyond the white-cube space of the traditional art gallery.

Kellems Dominik has exhibited solo presentations at The Laundry, (San Francisco), Onishi Project (New York), LaCuna Art Studios (Chicago), and at Coup d’Etat (San Francisco), with a forthcoming solo presentation at The Laundry (San Francisco) in January 2019. Her sculptural installations have been exhibited internationally in collaboration with the PUBLIC Hotel (Chicago), the Nautilus Hotel (Miami), and the Freehand Hotel (Miami). Kellems Dominik has further presented her work on the international art fair circuit, including with the Armory Show (New York), Scope Art Fair (Miami), the Tokyo International Art Fair (Tokyo), the Affordable Art Fair (New York).

For more about Suzy visit her website at https://www.suzykellemsdominik.com/ or follow her on Instagram.