The Formless is What Keeps Bleeding extends Cindy Rehm’s research into lost women—those who have been silenced throughout time through suppression or appropriation. Rehm’s project is comprised of nearly two-hundred collage drawings in response to Marcel Duchamp’s installation Étant donnés. The lifeless female body central to this work contains three women central to Duchamp’s life, who remain culturally obscure: book binder, Mary Reynolds, Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins, and his second wife Alexina "Teeny" Duchamp. In this series, Rehm explores the lingering presence of these three women and considers the possibility for a line of communication between women across generations.

The female body in Duchamp’s Étant donnés is a fetish object, her waxen-flesh frozen in splayed form, the visible pubic mound rendered as a gash, a wound offered up for visual penetration for all eternity. She is the dead girl in the woods, the Black Dahlia, Laura Palmer; she is all the female bodies ravished by misogyny, all those discounted, dismissed, and dismembered throughout history. She is broken, torn apart, but in pieces she is everywhere. Her potent female energy can be divided but not destroyed. Rehm’s collages engage a kind of reparative ritual to memorialize and restore these lost women.