Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York is thrilled to present The Chicken is Ready to Eat, a solo exhibition of works by Christine Stiver, curated by Dominic Terlizzi. This exhibition gathers Stiver’s hybrid sculptural approaches in an exhibition that transforms the gallery into a coop-like environment. Both the sculptures and installation embrace plurality and visual ambiguity.

Playfully, the show’s title presents a structural dilemma that aligns with Stiver’s approach in the studio. The phrase “The chicken is ready to eat,” presents multiple interpretations in which it is unclear who is eating who and who is ready for what. The plurality of this phrase means things can become simultaneously material and immaterial, abstract and concrete, in one place and in many places at the same time.

The chicken has appeared several times in Stiver’s studio practice over the years: a chicken sewn from leather jackets, a butter sculpted chicken claw in a refrigerator tabernacle, and most recently incarnated as feathery, paper, stick sculptures. This installation within TSA NY is built from one of Stiver’s recurring subjects, exploring Birdhood as Humanhood. The gallery has transformed into a space in which viewers are not clearly in a gallery or chicken coop, but somehow both. Stiver’s bent stick sculptures strike a pose on wire fence pedestals or perch against chicken wire walls.

Stiver bends sticks while they are still green, making swooping arabesque, wing-like curves. Paper skins hold their musculature, covered by plumage and textural patterns made from paper strips, twisted magazine quills, and slime charms. These pets all have unique personalities like a gaggle of hens. Stiver’s specific, fastidious paper process layered on top of her iterative stick forms reveals the potential of an intentionally ambiguous meaning. The possible misread offers an opportunity to believe something unintended by the artist but generated by the viewer. Assembling a group of objects that speak to this plurality opens up a myriad of loose ends, offering an adventure in the chicken run that’s all about deciphering what is being said. Don’t be chicken.

Christine Stiver is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn. At different points in her career, her work has explored dance, performance, drawing and sculpture. As a member of Effervescent Collective, she choreographed and produced Dank, her first full-length performance presented at the YNot Lot in Baltimore. Stiver later became a founding member of Triptych, which produced cross-disciplinary performance in the Baltimore region. Stiver seeks out meaningful collaborations with other artists that includes a video project, Mitochondrial Eve, performed with Tracie Jiggetts and presented at Vox Populi’s Minute Fest; collaborative bread and butter sculptures with Dominic Terlizzi at Good Naked Gallery in Brooklyn; and, Deep Six with Book Club Artists Collective at Spring Break Art Show 2020. She has shown her large scale drawing installations at St Charles Projects in Baltimore, Governors Island Art Fair, The Living Gallery in Brooklyn, and ArtPort Kingston. Most recently, Stiver has exhibited her sculptures at Tappeto Volante in Brooklyn, McBride Contemporain in Montreal, Headstone Gallery in Kingston, and at the SVA Gallery in Chelsea.