Forcefully this work appeared to me in the tiny little square on my see/saw app. Ramiken Gallery is tucked unassumingly in a building east of Seward Park, Manhattan. Turning circles and dead ending on a path with my sister after a jaunt in the Lower East Side, butting right up against the space, under drizzling skies we flailed to locate the art I felt could change my chemical makeup. I promise only partook in one kamikaze cocktail at that bar.

Finally in this space, a slit rips open a whim in me for feeling the floor and the wall and rigidity. Apparent hollow interiors, some revealed beneath translucent glass, combat the gossamer in this assertive display of Kristi Cavataro’s work.

Hard and slippery, the conjoined characteristics complete a motif of fucking, even if the linked pelvic bones and stacked boners were not present. Excuse me, erections, feeling as though I should speak more biologically; the statement used the word “meiosis” after all. This evidence of life provides a real umpf to my corneas, the structural experience is of a brutal fluidity. A thrilling corporeality possesses the voids of these stoic masses.

These giants have appendages penetrating, intermingling, intertwining; pelvic bones appear to be plunging into each other in that corner over there (this is visualization biasedly lesbian).

There is this one I specifically wanted to get myself inside of. It might satisfy my pining for closeness, thinking I can get inside someone’s rib cage if I press plentily in an embrace.

Standing in front of one of many works titled, Untitled, it is tempting to walk right into the space I felt I would fit into perfectly. The prongs for this pink sculpture mimicking ribs I wish to pull me in, or wrap my own limbs around it; a clinging animal. Thoughts flood of the entanglement of bodies and the matter inside of us when our vulnerabilities make physical contact with one another. When I make work I often think about fucking, I recently scrawled this into a notebook in my studio. “Making love”, maybe, struggling to put a definition to this intimate act, “sex” or not, as I put my hands all over the surface of my work and shove my fingers in crevices the attention I pay is as fervent as it is to my lover. My work couldn’t be any less about sex in its appearance, though. It is however about the complex entanglement of structures and their own sprawling reproduction.

Nudgingly I ask my sister, looking her in her eyes beneath bangs curling up from the wet conditions of outside, “which one” does she like? She points out the teal tower of fluctuating shapes like stacked torsos, and one on the wall behind it, which she says looks like a pelvic bone. Or a butterfly.

I then have a memory, I tell my sister, of assisting my freshman year college professor Bret Reif in constructing huge, tiled, phallic sculptures that more so reeked of desire, begging for attention. It was my first internship ever. Brett Reif wishes his work did this, I tell her, (he was a creep). I think he just wanted to make belligerent, in-your-face work.

After circling around the space, cleansing myself of that memory, I read the statement written by the gallery. I envy the way this gallery writes about this exhibit. It is deliberate and un-jaunting, gracefully using the term “fuck.” I did not need that word to be present in writing to see it here, and no, it is not the only thing I care about, nor what I think this work is about in its entirety. Biologically speaking it is the powerhouse of our existence; scientifically and societally speaking the physical act of sex is unnecessary for reproduction.

Unpretentiously, Cavataro’s work conveys to me the intricacies of reproduction; the desire for necessity and the necessity to desire.