| The notion of uncertainty is both disconcerting and liberating. By definition, uncertainty resists definition. Most synonyms for the word carry negative connotations: doubt, skepticism, mistrust, suspicion. While the term may seem unsettling, and perhaps appropriately reflects a shared awareness of the complexity of modern life, uncertainty can also be quite compelling in an artistic context. As “The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas” demonstrates, if art’s impact lies in its capacity to inspire and provoke—to pose questions rather than provide answers—then uncertainty may very well be essential to art. It is this quality of open-endedness that the nine artists included in this exhibition explore in their sculpture. |  |
The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas: Recent Sculpture – Anne Ellegood
The notion of uncertainty is both disconcerting and liberating. By definition, uncertainty resists definition. Most synonyms for the word carry negative connotations: doubt, skepticism, mistrust, suspicion. While the term may seem unsettling, and perhaps appropriately reflects a shared awareness of the complexity of modern life, uncertainty can also be quite compelling in an artistic context. As “The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas” demonstrates, if art’s impact lies in its capacity to inspire and provoke—to pose questions rather than provide answers—then uncertainty may very well be essential to art. It is this quality of open-endedness that the nine artists included in this exhibition explore in their sculpture.
These artists respond to the history of modern sculpture and its formal concerns—composition, articulation, balance, volume, line, materiality. At the same time, this work has ties to the material experimentation and social concerns of such groundbreaking 20th century movements and mediums as Cubist collage, Dada, Fluxus and various types of assemblage. Referencing earlier models like the readymade and Minimalism—for which machine-produced elements are central—and large-scale constructions by artists like Anthony Caro and Mark di Suvero, Mark Handforth re-envisions artifacts of the urban landscape, adding a sense of the absurd and melancholic to a formal sculptural language. Like past assemblagists, Charles Long discovers endless potential in the world around him, transforming found materials—from shopping carts to beer cans—and plaster and papier-mâché into psychologically charged constructions. For many years, Franz West has been making pieces that question modern sculpture as purely visual. By encouraging visitors to pick up, wear and sit upon his art, and through his truly original approach to surface, color and use of the pedestal, West enthusiastically challenges all sculptural conventions. Like these earlier practices, the sculpture in the exhibition asserts that art can, and should, be risky, contradictory and even unstable, incorporating strategies of chance and humor so that the work can remain open and unpredictable.
Giving form to the formless, these sculptors convert such theoretical and intangible notions as complex scientific and social theories, biological or physical phenomena, belief systems and subconscious states of mind into physical objects. Björn Dahlem, who is fascinated by theories about the makeup and origins of the universe, fashions an abundance of discarded items, wood panels and fluorescent lights into a “thought model” (to use his term) of a black hole. Disciplines as varied as music and color theory, economics and mathematics have inspired Evan Holloway’s distinctive pieces, including one that is an eccentric yet regimented play on putting a face on the numbering system. Mindy Shapero is absorbed with capturing the ethereal or fleeting in physical form. The act of seeing plays a central role in an ongoing narrative she has been writing and using as the basis of her sculpture, creating a fantastical world in which vision is related to both the natural world—rainbows, light, air—and to a sort of metaphysical or psychological state in which a lack of vision suggests a disconnection to self.
The sculptures gathered here are freestanding, self-contained pieces meant to be viewed from multiple perspectives. Resulting from labor-intensive processes in which materials are carefully combined and articulated, they are composed of both traditional sculptural matter like metal, wood, clay, papier-mâché and plaster and unexpected elements—from batteries to popsicle sticks, from furniture to wooden pallets, from reproductions of paintings to snapshots, from taxidermy specimens to stuffed animals—often deliberately incorporating the handmade with mass-produced consumer goods. Andrea Cohen is fascinated by the clash of nature and artifice and those social phenomena that encourage the two to adapt to one another. Cohen combines natural and synthetic materials into a complex network of lines that intersect, drape and stack. Rachel Harrison uses elaborate abstract forms to house mundane yet provocative commodities like a blond wig and Calvin Klein briefs, while Isa Genzken places the pedestal in raucous juxtaposition with the trappings of domestic life—dolls, figurines, wine glasses, vases, chairs—much of it upturned and splashed with paint. For all the artists in the exhibition, the medium of sculpture is an expansive field upon which to question and propose in order to explore how objects can still challenge and expand our ways of seeing.
