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Yasumasa Morimura uses imaging and photographic technology to investigate the genre of history painting in contemporary art. By also inserting himself into all of his images, Morimura creates an extended meditation on the complicated nature of narrative, portraiture, and mythology, showing how the contemporary individual is always rooted in historical precedent. Brothers (A Late Autumn Prayer) is inspired by French artist Jean-François Millet’s The Angelus (1857–59), in which two laboring peasants pray with bowed heads in a field. In lieu of the setting sun in Millet’s painting, Morimura has placed within his photograph the iconic image of a mushroom cloud, the atmospheric impact of a post-nuclear explosion. Other changes Morimura has made to Millet’s tableaux include farm tools exchanged for handguns and rifles, and himself posing as a peasant warrior rather than a tenant laborer. A powerfully visual comment on the devastation of war and nuclear disaster on the relationships between peoples and with the natural environment, Morimura’s photograph questions idyllic representations of history in the wake of historical violence.

2013.08

Often taking the form of vernacular furnishings—chairs, chests, sofas, and desks—Roy McMakin’s sculptures mine the roots of America’s pragmatism, as seen in the utility and plainness of Shaker design. McMakin’s interest in furniture began at an early age, when as a  thirteen-year-old he purchased a desk designed by Gustav Stickley. The desk ignited a passion for furniture and design, and fueled a thirty-year career in which McMakin has consistently questioned our relationship with the objects that surround us: the things we use every day that provide comfort and utility, engender memory and even affection. McMakin’s work can most readily be described as sculpture that looks like furniture, but it more accurately resides in—and gains significance from—the blurring of art, craft, and design. In fact, depending on the inclinations of the work’s owner, while the sculptures can be exhibited they can just as easily be used as furniture. The use, or nonuse, is determined by the context and the owner of the artwork.

McMakin’s recent sculpture focuses on the copy: the appropriation and mimicry of an object, often a culturally or emotionally loaded one. Taking a piece of furniture—perhaps found in an antique shop or even in his personal storage—McMakin replicates the object in precise detail. In Use/Used, created specifically for the ICA/Boston exhibition Figuring Color in 2012, McMakin copied two chairs: one, traditional in design, once white with red stripes is now yellowed with use and age; the other, midcentury modern in design, is a muted blue-green. McMakin was drawn to these chairs for the contrast in their forms and colors (and selected these particular chairs during a trip to nearby Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, where he has designed several home interiors). He says of this work, “Use/Used is about the life of furniture. I love the idea of taking these chairs that seem to have something to say about chairs and objects, as well as each other, and ‘retiring’ the originals to the rarified world of contemplative viewing and preservation. The two new chairs begin a new life as useful and meaningful objects.” In reproducing the chairs precisely, McMakin honors the originals while giving us a new, slightly odd couple. The used pair, now retired, hang side by side on the wall at painting height. They are to be looked at, their line and color to be considered. The newly built copies are for use: placed in the same room as the used chairs, they are gallery seating for visitors, to be moved and placed by visitors at whim.

Use/Used is at once painting, sculpture, and furniture, exploring the realm of the domestic in dialogue with works by Mona Hatoum, Taylor Davis, Josiah McElheny, and Doris Salcedo in the ICA’s collection.

2012.25

Charles LeDray has produced an extensive body of work in diverse sculptural materials, from large textiles and miniature ceramics to carved bone and intricate wire-based forms. Narrative, familiarity, and cultural history are powerful forces in LeDray’s sculptural work, which also touches on issues of work, manual labor, and gender roles. After his arrival to New York in the 1980s, his work began responding to the HIV/AIDS crisis, most notably using dismembered teddy bears to create sculptures that addressed the socio-political climate of the pandemic and its disproportionate effect on the LGBTQI+ community.

As an artist, LeDray is best known for his work in textiles and his skillful stitching. He learned to sew at a very young age from his mother and became self-taught in various craft mediums, from ceramics to dressmaking. Through a painstaking process completed entirely by hand, LeDray assembles hundreds of individual components into new formal sculptures that appear as seemingly familiar objects, such as men’s suits or miniature toys. Reconfigured through craft-based techniques of sewing, sculpting, and carving, LeDray’s sculptures bear both a sense of the familiar and the alienation of the unknown, the unexpected, and even the uncomfortable, for how his works push their material capacity to new associations.

For LeDray, clothing is bound up with the history of identity, gender, and expression. Clothesline is an example of this interest through the layered symbolism of a stretched, hanging sculptural work suspended from the ceiling to coil on the floor. In this work, LeDray uses everyday objects and the intimacy of hand-stitched cloth. These doll-sized clothes hang from the ceiling in a striking downward line that pools into a swirling form on the floor of the gallery, though one might also expect that that stitched fabric threads are ascending upwards as much as they descend. With its miniature scale, realistic detail, and poetic reflections on individuality and collectivity, Clothesline demonstrates LeDray’s unique skill in reconfiguring expectation and exciting wonder in the everyday.

800.13.02

Although her work encompasses painting, photography, sculpture, and video, Yayoi Kusama is perhaps best known for her overwhelming installations. Using various combinations of motifs such as lights, dots, and phalluses, Kusama creates environments that are frequently described as “obsessive,” filling entire rooms with repeated shapes and images. The artist herself has said she is an “obsessional artist.” The term refers not only to her art but also to her mental condition. The artist has experienced obsessive-compulsive disorder since 1973, the year she returned to Japan from the United States. She checked herself into a hospital for the mentally ill in Tokyo in 1975, and since 1977 has lived in the facility, within walking distance of the studio where she works.

A Flower (No. 14) is one of Kusama’s early works, created before she arrived in the U.S. in 1958. Originally trained in the traditional Japanese style of painting, Kusama began studying Western styles in 1952, becoming especially interested in the work of American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, with whom she began a correspondence in the late 1950s. A Flower (No. 14) reveals the influence of O’Keeffe’s floral paintings: Kusama foregrounds her subject on the picture plane, and seems to play on the similarities between vaginal and floral anatomies. One of several related compositions Kusama made during this period, A Flower (No. 14) is an early example of her experimentation with the dots that would eventually become a signature motif that is repeated throughout her monumental installations.

The first work by Kusama to enter the ICA/Boston collection, A Flower (No. 14) strengthens the museum’s holdings of work by key feminists working in the 1960s and ’70s, such as Louise Bourgeois and Nancy Spero, and serves the ICA’s goal of augmenting its collection of works by international artists.

2014.28

Ragnar Kjartansson draws on a variety of cultural sources—from American musical traditions to the landscapes of his native Iceland—to create memorable works that challenge the boundaries between reality and fiction. His videos are often humorous, placing the performer against extreme conditions. Through repetition, Kjartansson’s videos create unexpected meanings, eliciting contradictory feelings of pleasure and anxiety, humor and sincerity, sentimentality and skepticism.

The Visitors is a major video installation filmed in 2012 at Rokeby Farm located in upstate New York’s Hudson Valley. The artist and a group of musicians occupy different rooms of the rambling and opulent estate, performing a sixty-four-minute arrangement composed by Kjartansson and Davíð Þór Jónsson. Displayed across nine screens, each video channel features musicians either by themselves or in groups playing instruments separately but simultaneously. Only in the installation of the work does the total musical composition form a whole. As the performers leave their individual rooms, the screens turn black until, at the end, the entire group is seen on a single screen walking away from the house through a field. The Visitors creates a uniquely layered portrait of the house and its musical inhabitants.

The Visitors was the first multiscreen video projection in the ICA/Boston’s growing collection of time-based media. The ICA has exhibited many multiscreen installations by artists such as Isaac Julien and Nathalie Djurberg and maintains a commitment to supporting this important contemporary medium. The ICA presented a traveling solo exhibition of Kjartansson’s work in 2012. The Visitors joins another video by Kjartansson, The Man, 2010, as well as major video installations by Steve McQueen and Mika Rottenberg.

2013.15

Ragnar Kjartansson makes performance and video works that sample a wide range of cultural productions, from the sagas of his native Iceland to American blues music. Investigating the porous boundaries between reality and fiction, Kjartansson’s song-filled performances are often inspired by misheard lyrics. His videos, often humorous, destabilize traditional readings of myth, cultural history, and authenticity. A brilliant and nimble performer, Kjartansson uses music to explore the persona of the performer, whom he frequently sets against extreme conditions. In one work, the artist and a friend play rock and roll in the heart of the wintry Canadian Rockies, and in another, he croons, bare-chested, while buried waist-deep in the ground. Kjartansson also presents what can be considered “portraits” of other performers, including his mother. The artist’s lush videos—characterized by incongruous settings, repetition, endurance, and comical or nostalgic soundtracks—evoke contradictory feelings of pleasure and anxiety, humor and sincerity, sentimentality and skepticism.

The Man is a portrait of the iconic American blues musician Pinetop Perkins (1913–2011). Born in Belzoni, Mississippi, Perkins began playing guitar and piano during the emergence of the Delta blues. Kjartansson’s portrait of Perkins participates in a century-long history of white people’s celebration, and exploitation, of the innovation and perceived authenticity of black musicians. Although the setting—an upright piano situated in a field occupied only by a vacant farmhouse—is contrived by the artist, the eccentric performance is spontaneous and unedited. Frail and perhaps experiencing dementia, Perkins repeats songs and statements in an unmediated loop. Kjartansson’s video is a dual portrait of an elderly man at the end of his life and a historically important musician who is the keeper of a disappearing tradition.

The Man uniquely joins the genres of portraiture and landscape through the use of video and song. This important work adds to the diversity of the ICA/Boston’s growing collection of video work, by artists such as Kader Attia, Paul Chan, and Christian Jankowski. The Man also contributes to the ICA’s collection of photographic work by important practitioners such as Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Catherine Opie, and Thomas Ruff, who similarly explore and challenge long-held assumptions surrounding the traditions of landscape and portraiture.

2013.14

For the last fifty years, Sheila Hicks has been one of the foremost artists working in the medium of fiber. Alongside notable contemporaries such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Lenore Tawney, and Claire Zeisler, Hicks moved fiber from the loom into the realms of sculpture and architecture. The 1960s and ’70s—when much of this groundbreaking work gained notice—saw the divisions between art and craft eroded by experimentation with nontraditional sculptural materials. Parallel developments occurred in the contemporary art world as artists such as Eva Hesse and Robert Morris began to use fiber in their process-based work. Hicks, now in her eighties, continues to be a renegade sculptor devoted to fiber, or as she often calls her medium, “the linear pliable element.”

Banisteriopsis II is a freestanding sculpture made of compacted linen, gathered and wrapped (most closely resembling a leek or ponytail) to generate endlessly repeatable elements. It was created in 2010 and combined with an earlier work from the Banisteriopsis series (in the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) for Hicks’s fifty-year-career survey. The re-creation and expansion of this work is in-line with Hicks’s working process. Hicks’s work in fiber was pioneering in its reliance on serial forms and the specificity of site. She often changed her sculpture according to the exhibition context, and even destroyed older artworks by reusing elements for entirely new sculptures. The deployment of serial forms was unprecedented in fiber work, but entirely in keeping with sculptural movements of the 1960s, minimalism in particular. The Banisteriopsis series is among the most important in Hicks’s oeuvre, not only for its form but its use of vivid yellow. Hicks was attempting to make a new kind of sculpture in fiber, and her groundbreaking move to pile fiber is recognized by art historians as one of the most important transformations of the new movement in fiber art.

Banisteriopsis II is an exceptional addition of fiber art to the museum’s collection and was featured in the ICA/Boston’s 2014–15 exhibition Fiber: Sculpture 1960–Present. It is a major work by this critically important, yet under-recognized artist. The relation to works by Mona Hatoum, Tara Donovan, and Faith Wilding illustrates a way of making sculpture far outside the conventional trajectories of sculpture’s histories.

2012.26

Born in Germany, Charline von Heyl moved to New York in the mid-1990s and has pursued a vigorous and multivalent artistic practice. In her paintings, drawings, prints, and collages, von Heyl harnesses abstraction as a process of discovery, adding marks and obliterating them to produce vibrant and layered works.

This set of ten untitled drawings from 2003 was originally exhibited as part of an installation of forty-four black-and-white works at Petzel Gallery in New York. They demonstrate von Heyl’s interest in stimulating play between figuration and abstraction, as recognizable elements seem to lurk within the matrix of the abstract works. In 2001, von Heyl had begun to work with a photocopier, using the device as part of her experimental process of deriving patterns, lines, shapes, and motifs from found images. Von Heyl has drawn on a diverse range of visual sources, from Otto Ubbelohde’s illustrations for an early twentieth-century edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales to images from Dion Buzzati’s 1969 graphic novel Poema a fumetti, based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In von Heyl’s hands, such sources relinquish their specific references and figures, offering a plenitude of marks and gestures that she integrates into powerful and unified artworks.

This suite of drawings is part of the ICA/Boston’s collection of works that explore the history of abstraction and mark making by such artists as Matthew Ritchie and Amy Sillman, and complements another work by von Heyl in the collection, the large-scale painting Guitar Gangster, 2013.

2015.25.1-10

Since the late 1990s, when Hito Steyerl became well known as an artist, writer, and filmmaker exploring the forms and potential of the experimental documentary, her work has consistently probed the power and complexity of images. Steyerl’s themes have expanded over the decade to tackle the status of images in an increasingly digital world and their relationship to the possibilities for documentary, screen culture, financial and economic systems, institutions (including the museum), networks, corporate theory, and labor. She has engaged a fascinating array of individuals as subjects and has employed increasingly sophisticated approaches to editing, digital graphics, and video installation architecture. In these formal and conceptual approaches, she is one of the most forward-thinking artists working today.

Liquidity Inc. is a beguiling post-economic crash parable of mixed martial arts (MMA) fighting, high-frequency trading, weather systems, and the liquidity of markets, labor, and information. Watching the screen while lounging on oversized beanbags, the viewer is prone and comfortable while awash in digital images of water (a main character), clouds, Hokusai, and a Lehman Brothers trader-turned-mercenary. The work’s clearest narrative arc involves Jacob Wood, who lost his job in finance during the 2008 recession and turned his hobby of MMA fighting into a new career. The film shows MMA matches, interviews with fight experts, and Wood narrating his story: “You don’t want to be frozen, that’s the kiss of death, so you’re always being liquid, and moving, whether you’re striking, faking fainting, or doing take-downs.” Liquidity Inc. employs “liquidity” as a morphing trope to describe the circulation of digital images, data, and information, financial assets, and water as resource and component of our bodies, the weather, and the shifting roles and definitions of labor in our economy. “Liquidity” is abstracted and made into an icon or a kind of mantra, the ultimate expression of economic pressures for its constant adaptability and the precariousness it produces. As importantly, liquidity becomes a means of video making, whereby Steyerl practically invents a new form, interspersing sophisticated CGI, green screen scenes, catchy music changes, and an unparalleled understanding of our contemporary syntax of embedded videos, swipes, clips, scrolls, and windows. Weather reports delivered by “terrorists” (kitsch approximations, including a little girl) refer to the popular weather forecasting website, the Weather Underground, which took its name from the 1970s radical group. Here, clouds become “the cloud” of digital storage, bound up in transnational treaties governing the security of data and the Gulf Stream of information. Steyerl serves as a radical, quick-witted commentator on the most urgent issues of our time. And she does so with a formal acuity, political creativity, and technological sophistication unmatched by her peers.

Liquidity Inc. extends the concerns of videos in the ICA/Boston collection like Christian Jankowski’s The Hunt, 1992/97, and Trevor Paglen’s Untitled (Reaper Drone), 2012, yet also forges a new path in dealing with the Internet’s influence on contemporary culture, economics, and daily life.

2015.31

Though she works in a variety of mediums, from painting and drawing to light-projection and video, Kara Walker is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. A visual language introduced at her New York debut at the Drawing Center in 1994, the silhouette has become Walker’s signature means of interrogating the highly fraught histories of slavery, racism, and gender discrimination in the United States.

The Nigger Huck Finn … was commissioned for the 2010 exhibition Huckleberry Finn at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco, the final in a trilogy of exhibitions based on canonical American novels. Huckleberry Finn revisits Mark Twain’s investigation of racial tensions in America through an extensive range of materials, including historical artifacts, documents, silent film footage, existing works, and fourteen new commissions that responded directly to the novel. Walker’s response is a sweeping cut-paper wall installation composed of silhouetted figures set on a light brown ground line painted directly on the wall, punctuated by seven framed gouaches. In preparing for the exhibition, Walker reread Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, coming away from it, as she has said, with “a better understanding of Huck, because he’s an abused child and a seeker of freedom.” Using this reading as a point of departure, The Nigger Huck Finn … depicts repeated Huck Finn–like characters—alongside caricatures of Jim and Pap, as well as Topsy from Uncle Tom’s Cabin—in a series of scenes adapted imaginatively by Walker to convey a heightened sense of violence and sexuality.

The Nigger Huck Finn … is unusual within Walker’s body of work, as it combines cut-paper silhouettes, wall paint, and framed works on paper, making it a major addition to the ICA/Boston’s collection. It joins works by Kerry James Marshall and Lorna Simpson that also engage with the complex and pressing issues of race and identity through the distinctive vision of contemporary art.

2015.09