Essex Flowers is pleased to present of the soft parts, a New York debut solo exhibition of Hawaii-based artist Juvana Soliven. This exhibition presents a years-long exploration of work that utilizes a pixelated censor motif as a visual language that speaks to themes of bodily autonomy, gender performance, and survival. of the soft parts’ title is an excerpt from Terri Kapsalis’ “Mastering the Female Pelvis: Race and Tools of Reproduction”, an essay which articulates the horror of gynecological practices suffered by enslaved Black women, the mass sterilization by the US of women and girls in Puerto Rico, the forced sterilization of incarcerated women, and coercive and “incentivized” contraceptive trials placed on poor women of color around the world by US and European governments. These are systems of control exercised against women under the guise of societal improvement and medical advancement that would contribute to the fulfillment of our duties in society. of the soft parts presents a years-long dedication to challenging those systems of control — offering a mirror against societal views on women, the trauma inflicted, and how far we have and haven’t come as a society.

Soliven’s work subverts and utilizes object languages to speak to issues regarding intimacy, labor, grief, bodily autonomy, human rights, and women’s positionality within the patriarchal system — many works resulting in amalgamate forms of the censored body, medical implement, weapon, adornment, and trap. Censorship, much like our bodies, relations, and genders, may be weaponized. It has both the power to protect the privacy and humanity of those vulnerable to scrutiny and the power to render perverse and profane what ought not to be. The conflict presented in the pixelated censor is used broadly in her work and is interrogated through the tedium of craft practices — beading, weaving, paper crafts, metalsmithing, enameling, sewing — as a meditation on labor and the endless work needed to fight for what is ours.

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Juvana Soliven is a visual artist and educator from Honolulu, Hawaii. Soliven holds an MFA in Metalsmithing at Cranbrook Academy of Art (2016), a BFA in Sculpture at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa (2013), and studied Art Restoration and Conservation at Lorenzo de’ Medici International School in Florence, Italy (2012). Soliven is a Lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Her work is in the collections of Cranbrook Art Museum, Williams College Museum of Art, Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Art in Public Places Collection of the Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. Soliven has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Netherlands, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Finland, Argentina, and South Korea. She is a 2025 Joan Mitchell Fellow with the Joan Mitchell Foundation and was a member of the 2024 Teaching Artist Cohort with Center for Craft. juvanasoliven.com