(Do Ho Suh, Specimen Series: Refrigerator, Apartment A, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2013. Polyester fabric, stainless steel wire, glass display case with LED lighting; Edition of 3. Courtesy Gazelli Art House, LTD.)
By Betsy DiJulio
Recently, Lucas Matheson, curator at the CNU’s Mary M. Torggler Fine Arts Center, generously agreed to figuratively walk me through the “future-focused” slate of exhibitions currently on view in all galleries of the institution, offering his perspective and pointing the way to additional investigations. These works are on view through May 17.
Noland Edwards Gallery
Future Fossils
“What kinds of things will we leave behind for future archaeologists and paleontologists to study?” is the question at the heart of Future Fossils which was organized by the MassArt Art Museum, Boston, MA, and curated by c² curatorsquared, a curatorial partnership between Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox.
In answer, some 17 artists from North America, Latin America, and Europe—iconic names like Do Ho Suh, Ai Weiwei, Rachel Whiteread, as well as newer artists on the scene, like Matthew Angelo Harrison and Clarissa Tossin—consider the theme of what lasts and why at both the macro and micro levels through highly individual approaches to material culture. According to Matheson, “Many contemporary artists are interested in the question of value: what ends up in museums, what lands in the trash heap, and how art fits into that.”
For decades, Do Ho Suh has recreated to-scale ephemeral spaces and artifacts of past residences, from his parents’ home in South Korea to his apartment in New York City. As with the blue refrigerator-freezer in this exhibition, these evocative objects are sewn from translucent polyester fabric, exuding a sense of the presence of absence.
Ai Weiwei, an artist, activist, and vocal critic of the Chinese government’s stance on democracy and human rights, is known as an outspoken provocateur creating sculpture, photography, and public works that expose, question, and thumb his nose at, especially, Chinese authorities. He has also famously photographed himself “flipping the bird” at bastions of power. Three colorful glass casts of his hand making the infamous gesture are included in the exhibition.
English artist, Dame Rachel Whiteread, carved out a niche in the contemporary art world when she began making translucent and opaque casts—some of monumental scale—of negative spaces, becoming the first woman to win the coveted Turner Prize. From entire houses and rooms to furniture and domestic objects, line, form, memory, and perception are all drivers in her vast body of work. In this show, she is represented by a small hand-painted bronze cast of the inside of a box.
Matheson likens the work of Detroit native, Matthew Angelo Harrison, to Jurassic Park in that the artist encases objects in polyurethane resin. In this case, fragments of car headlights, relics of Motor City’s auto industry with its precarious past and future and its questionable business model viability—his mother worked on the GM assembly line—have been reassembled into gleamingly seductive abstract sculpture.
Traditional and contemporary means of production and consumption are woven together, literally, in Clarissa Tossin’s “New Grammar of Forms #4,” a tableau of baskets woven from Amazon delivery boxes instead of natural fibers that echo indigenous Amazonian styles. Much is at play here, from the impact of Amazon’s massive delivery network on the rainforest to globalization, capitalism, and hybridization.
Matheson’s “metric of intrigue” is based on making the familiar unfamiliar and vice versa. As he planned the installation of these recent familiarized/defamiliarized relics, he looked for affinities between works, e.g. playing with ideas of concealing and revealing or, in the case of a chandelier and a formal gown, “the visual iconography of balls and dances.” Gun-related works by Reynier Leyva and Studio Drift are placed in conversation with each other around the topic of “materiality and violence.”
Together, these works present a highly formal aesthetic statement that, at first glance, may belie the layered complexity of contemporary life. But it is there, often encased in resin: from individual memories to the body politic, ancient craft to industrial design, and capitalism to protest and political violence.
Studio Lemercier: Rising Waters
Studio Lemercier, aka Joanie Lemercier and Juliette Bibasse—French artists based in Brussels—dives into the age-old questions of the relationship between humans and the environment, humans and machines, and humans and art. Against the backdrop of sea level rise in response to climate change, this exhibition features a centrally placed machine that will create 97 plotter drawings—one per day—over the course of the exhibition.
Plotter drawings are essentially sharp, detailed, large-scale graphics produced by a computer-driven machine that moves drawing tools across paper to inscribe continuous lines. Here, the computers are programmed by the artists and the drawings that emerge are recognizable oceanic forms. The continual production and piling up of the drawings during the run of the exhibition serve as a metaphor for the ongoing nature and cumulative impact of sea level rise.
Studio Lemercier: Rising Waters is organized by the Mary M. Torggler Fine Arts Center in collaboration with Superblue.
Microgallery
Kang Seung Lee: Skin
This six-minute video by Seoul-born and Los Angeles-based Kang Seung Lee is the third in a trilogy that explores dance as far more than choreographed steps. For Lee, internationally known for his work about identity and community, dance is a nexus of movement, certainly, but also memory, sensation, and personal and collective storytelling along the spectrum from grief to joy.
For this piece, Lee filmed Meg Harper, a dancer, teacher, and choreographer with an illustrious career that dates to her affiliation with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1968-2006. As the electronic score pulses, Harper repeats a catalogue of movements memorized over her long career as close-up shots reveal how time becomes imprinted on the body—the creases, wrinkles, scars, and mars—and how memory lives both in the mind and the muscles. Matheson also sees the piece as a “meditation on the sorts of skin we do not see in Dove ads,” noting that young and taught skin is very visible in our society but, “after a certain age, it disappears from public view.”
Community Gallery
Note: this exhibition closes on April 5.
Courtney Mattison: Surface Tension
Elegant, complex, sublime, and sobering, the swirling ceramic installations of Courtney Mattison, a San Francisco-based artist and ocean advocate, teach but don’t preach. Trained as an artist and a marine ecologist, both her undergraduate and graduate work merged her two passions. Her BA is in marine ecology and ceramic sculpture (Skidmore College, 2008), and her MA is in environmental studies (Brown University, 2011, with thesis coursework at the Rhode Island School of Design).
Though her home base is on another shore, her intricate explosions of form speak in a language understood in far flung coastal communities, including ours. Evoking coral reefs in mesmerizing colors that transition into bleached colonies, her work is a response to human-caused threats of climate change, pollution, and overfishing.