Consider the Lobster, titled after an essay by the late David Foster Wallace, is the first major survey of New York-based artist Rachel Harrison. This exhibition will encompass over ten years of large-scale installations by Harrison, all of which will be reconfigured for the CCS Bard Galleries, and include a number of the autonomous sculptural and photographic works for which she is best known.
In addition to the interior galleries, Harrison has taken the idea of the museum as a platform, or pedestal for art, further by reinstalling Franz West's light blue Couch up on the roof of the Hessel. On the lawn in front of the museum, Harrison has also topped the two truncheon-like protrusions of West'sMercury with specially made wigs, a characteristic juxtaposition for Harrison and a playful nod to an artistic figure with whom she is often compared. This intervention on the West is poignantly resonant of many of Harrison's sculptural strategies. Her ungainly, blobby sculptures (often sat atop painted pedestals) are coated with a signature pearlescent paint, on top of which she posts photographs (often taken from the tabloid press or Google image searches), inserts video monitors, or effortlessly drops found objects to create a multivalent rebus, challenging the viewer to connect apparently disparate clues. In this, she has bridged the divisions of sculpture, photography, painting, video, and installation. She does so with a canny wit, a taste for irony and its oft-companion, tragedy.
And Other Essays in the Hessel Museum expands Harrison's deft exploration of exhibition-making by inviting Nayland Blake, Tom Burr, Harry Dodge, Alix Lambert, Allen Ruppersberg, and Andrea Zittel—a group of colleagues from different generations (and with a very diverse range of artistic practices)—to select and rehang the center's contemporary art collection. Like Harrison's work itself, this multifaceted (somewhat open-ended) project suggests there is no one, true methodology for looking at art or one uniform principle to curating an exhibition. Showing works from more than 40 years of Marieluise Hessel's tireless collecting, the artists each represent very different approaches in their selection of other artists, the inclusion of their own works, and the ways in which they have curated their rooms. Harrison has also included two of her sculptures (Pink Stool, 2005 and Schamtte with President, 2006) now in the collection and her photographic series Voyage of the Beagle, Two, named after Charles Darwin's travelogue from the mid-19th century. In Harrison's "visual diary" of 58 photographs, an Elvis Presley mannequin sits alongside a fountain lion and Sponge Bob Square Pant's Patrick; Diana Ross's album cover portrait stands between a western cowboy and a fairground alien. Curator Alison Gingeras asks, "Can a sculpture be produced by a camera?" The answer is a "resounding yes." Her work has been compared to being stranded at an airport, suggesting perhaps that it occupies a space where worlds collide. It is a collision that Harrison celebrates in her work, breaking down hierarchies and forcing us to see the world anew.
Consider the Lobster will be on view at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, from April 27 - June 20, 2010
Consider the Lobster is curated by Tom Eccles.
In addition to the interior galleries, Harrison has taken the idea of the museum as a platform, or pedestal for art, further by reinstalling Franz West's light blue Couch up on the roof of the Hessel. On the lawn in front of the museum, Harrison has also topped the two truncheon-like protrusions of West'sMercury with specially made wigs, a characteristic juxtaposition for Harrison and a playful nod to an artistic figure with whom she is often compared. This intervention on the West is poignantly resonant of many of Harrison's sculptural strategies. Her ungainly, blobby sculptures (often sat atop painted pedestals) are coated with a signature pearlescent paint, on top of which she posts photographs (often taken from the tabloid press or Google image searches), inserts video monitors, or effortlessly drops found objects to create a multivalent rebus, challenging the viewer to connect apparently disparate clues. In this, she has bridged the divisions of sculpture, photography, painting, video, and installation. She does so with a canny wit, a taste for irony and its oft-companion, tragedy.
And Other Essays in the Hessel Museum expands Harrison's deft exploration of exhibition-making by inviting Nayland Blake, Tom Burr, Harry Dodge, Alix Lambert, Allen Ruppersberg, and Andrea Zittel—a group of colleagues from different generations (and with a very diverse range of artistic practices)—to select and rehang the center's contemporary art collection. Like Harrison's work itself, this multifaceted (somewhat open-ended) project suggests there is no one, true methodology for looking at art or one uniform principle to curating an exhibition. Showing works from more than 40 years of Marieluise Hessel's tireless collecting, the artists each represent very different approaches in their selection of other artists, the inclusion of their own works, and the ways in which they have curated their rooms. Harrison has also included two of her sculptures (Pink Stool, 2005 and Schamtte with President, 2006) now in the collection and her photographic series Voyage of the Beagle, Two, named after Charles Darwin's travelogue from the mid-19th century. In Harrison's "visual diary" of 58 photographs, an Elvis Presley mannequin sits alongside a fountain lion and Sponge Bob Square Pant's Patrick; Diana Ross's album cover portrait stands between a western cowboy and a fairground alien. Curator Alison Gingeras asks, "Can a sculpture be produced by a camera?" The answer is a "resounding yes." Her work has been compared to being stranded at an airport, suggesting perhaps that it occupies a space where worlds collide. It is a collision that Harrison celebrates in her work, breaking down hierarchies and forcing us to see the world anew.
Consider the Lobster will be on view at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, from April 27 - June 20, 2010
Consider the Lobster is curated by Tom Eccles.
No comments:
Post a Comment