As Every Little Thing combines both female and male body parts, it is in some respects, more than the average human. It is also literally incapacitated.
Every Little Thing might be a permanently conjoined couple, structurally unable to consummate its relationship- both a platonically ideal hermaphrodite and a practical disaster.
The title came from a saccharine boy band love song that was popular in 2000, “Every Little Thing You Do.” In the song, the phrase is part of an unabashed declaration of permanent devotion. In the case of the sculpture, it might refer to an incapacitating attachment- i.e. everything little thing about you affects me because I can’t get away from you ever.
The piece was originally designed to be exhibited lounging on a Chelsea rooftop sculpture garden, evoking the tradition of reclining nudes, from decorative art historical odalisques to uncomfortable contemporary nude sunbathers. Every Little Thing proved to be too anatomically specific on the male side to be displayed on the Chelsea rooftop back in 2001. But it was perhaps more appropriately included in an exhibition on the theme of Monsters at the DeCordova Museum later that year.
It remains to be seen if we are any more friendly to monsters with male body parts 20 years later.
Nina Levy is a Brooklyn artist who makes sculpture and photographs and teaches at the New York Academy of Art. She has exhibited with the National Portrait Gallery in D.C., the Aldrich, Brooklyn, DeCordova, and San Diego Museums of Contemporary Art among others.
From NY Times review by Miles Unger:
“If monsters can be fashioned from ill-proportioned or mismatched human parts, they can also be formed from the parts of many species or, in the case of Nina Levy’s ”Every Little Thing You Do,” parts borrowed liberally from both sexes. The cast-resin sculpture depicts male and female bodies impossibly merging into a single sleek form. This hybrid resembles nothing found in nature but, like most of the work in the show, it reflects a palpable psychological reality — the bliss and anxiety that accompanies a union in which one risks losing one’s own identity.
The hybrid, like the creature made monstrous through lack of correct proportion, embodies the fear of losing control or identity as form melts into incomprehensible formlessness. “