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Sara VanDerBeek investigates the representation of three-dimensional sculpture through the two-dimensional lens of photography. She painstakingly builds sculptures in order to photograph them, disassembling the objects as soon as the documentation is complete. The sculptures thus quickly come to exist only as images. This process inserts VanDerBeek into ongoing debates about what is gained and lost when viewers experience sculpture through photographic images, and the play between the three-dimensionality of one medium versus the two-dimensionality of another.

Medusa is a photograph of an assemblage VanDerBeek created in her studio. The temporary sculpture is a totem of images of historical sculptures, ranging from classical statuary and friezes to a work by the turn-of-the-century Italian artist Medardo Rosso. At the bottom of the objects is a piece of contemporary jewelry. One key element is a red-tinted photograph of Medusa, a figure from Greek mythology who turns humans into stone with her gaze, a process that can be analogized with photography, especially photography of classical sculpture. The work registers VanDerBeek’s engagement with art-historical references and contemporary modes of image making.

The ICA/Boston has strong holdings in photography and sculpture, and VanDerBeek’s Medusa brings these two strengths together while adding a new artist to those represented in the growing collection.

2015.04

During the 1980s, Meyer Vaisman was associated with the Neo-Geo movement—along with other soon-to-be-famous artists such as Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, and Haim Steinbach—and gained recognition for works that simultaneously critiqued and celebrated mechanization, consumer culture, and the art market. Vaisman founded the seminal East Village gallery International with Monument, which exhibited the work of his contemporaries. Vaisman’s works from this period show a sense of humor tinged with irony and cynicism.

Utilizing satire like a defense mechanism, in Untitled Vaisman presents cartoon portraits of himself and others. The “others” are old men and busty sex symbols seemingly appropriated from found comic strips or maybe skin magazines. The cigar-chomping figure with a protruding chin at the far left represents the artist. Itself an appropriation, the caricature was made by a street portraitist stationed near the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy—one of the oldest and most famous museums in the Western world. Using process inks and acrylic, Vaisman crafts a painting made of a number of smaller paintings that speak more to generic printing than painting.

The addition of Untitled introduces the work of an important artist new to the ICA/Boston collection, and reflects the ICA’s interest in the decade of the 1980s, as reflected in such memorable shows as the 2012 This Will Have Been: Art, Love, & Politics in the 1980s.

2012.19

Californian artist Kaari Upson uses found objects and narratives as starting points for her work. Upson is interested in issues of identity, familiarity, and domesticity. In 2007, she initiated the long-term Larry Project that involved the collection and rearrangement of abandoned objects, photographs, and personal ephemera she discovered at a burned-down house in her neighborhood. The project was an intimate and at times manic investigation into the life of a stranger, resulting in a large body of work that included video, drawings, paintings, sculptures, and performances.

For her 2011 installation at the Overduin and Kite gallery in Los Angeles, Upson recreated a cast figure of Larry, which she subsequently burned in a room-sized box. For this same exhibition, Upson presented a series of charcoal tablets that preserved her bodily motions. To produce these works, she mixed charcoal dust with resin and performed movements over flexible metal sheets, such as dragging, contracting, and pouring. The sheets were altered by the corporeal weight of the artist, capturing her gestural actions. In Charcoal Tablet 6, the artist pressed her fist into the material, transcribing the sexual act of fisting and creating a work that blurs the lines of performance, sculpture, and painting.

Upson’s Charcoal Tablet 6 enriches the ICA/Boston’s collection of works by artists, such as Mona Hatoum and Sophie Calle, who explore the intersection of sculpture and performance to examine issues of trust and intimacy.

800.13.06

Mickalene Thomas draws on art history and popular culture to create a contemporary vision of black female sexuality, beauty, and power. Combining the genres of portraiture and domestic interior, her stunning large-scale paintings depict African-American women posed within boldly patterned interiors, the picture surfaces often adorned with Swarovski rhinestones. Thomas starts her process by collaging staged photographs, sometimes taken from her family’s photo album, with patterns and styles frequently drawn from 1970s advertising. She then enlarges and transforms these source images into monumental paintings to explore such central artistic problems as the construction of space and the role of the female body.

The interior scene depicted in Monet’s Salon is made up of a dizzying array of fractured planes. In the foreground, Thomas places a white lounge chair with a floral motif made from green and pink rhinestones—a striking amalgamation of a nineteenth-century impressionist salon staple with a contemporary material twist. The rest of the scene is composed of areas depicting foliage seen through windowpanes, a window ledge with books and a houseplant, a salon-style hanging of monochromatic paintings, and sections of wallpaper and Oriental rugs. About her interest in fracture Thomas has said, “The process of collage allowed me to navigate the structure of an image: segmenting, deconstructing, pasting, and recontextualizing my ideas. I wanted to shift ways of seeing the image.” A set of brown stanchions in the foreground separate the viewer from the scene, as if it were a museum gallery or a room in a historic house.

This significant painting by one of the most prominent young voices in contemporary art today greatly enhances the ICA/Boston’s small collection of painting and marks the museum’s solo exhibition of Thomas’s work in 2012. It joins significant paintings in the collection by Alice Neel, Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, and Lisa Yuskavage, diversifying these holdings while reflecting a continued and prevalent interest in representation and abstraction.

800.12.4

Keith Sonnier’s work debuted in Lucy Lippard’s famous 1966 exhibition Eccentric Abstraction, a pointed response to the end-game strategies of minimalist sculpture. Minimalism’s geometric, machine-made, and unified forms were countered by Sonnier and other so-called postminimalist artists working in downtown New York in the late 1960s—including Eva Hesse, Barry Le Va, Richard Tuttle, and Jackie Winsor—with diffuse forms, a process-oriented approach, and performative elements. Though Sonnier studied painting, early on he moved into three dimensions, the use of neon, and the integration of movement in the form of video art and performance.

Depose II is one of Sonnier’s rare inflatable sculptures. Using the unlikely combination of neon lighting, metal, and nylon sailcloth, Sonnier balances a readymade aesthetic with painted geometric elements. The metal forms that pinch the inflatable are based on extruded found material, such as the rebar commonly used to build cement structures. The gestural neon shapes derive from the artist’s drawings. The inflatable assumes an anthropomorphic form that, when filled with air from the blower, suggests a living being. Initially a limp sack, the sculpture must breathe and expand to assume its final form. The title references the act of being deposed, wherein a person is required to give oral out-of-court testimony. The person being deposed is often asked exceedingly personal questions. Perhaps the pinched or pressed inflatable alludes to the feeling of duress that might arise from having to tell the truth in a compromising situation.

Depose II is the first work by Sonnier to enter the ICA/Boston collection. It is a unique postminimalist sculpture that integrates fabric, a medium the ICA collects and exhibits in depth. It joins a number of important sculptures made of repurposed materials by such artists as Tara Donovan and Rachel Harrison.

2013.12

Kelly Sherman’s video- and text-based work reveals the dynamics of family and social relationships through carefully constructed charts, graphs, diagrams, and picture sequences. Sherman derives her source materials from her own experiences and those of strangers as gleaned from online searches and personal interviews. In elegantly restrained visual statements that speak to shared humanity, the artist considers the emotive power of a single word, the strategic placement of a symbol, the weight of a demarcating line, and the precise shade of a particular color.

In Wish Lists, Sherman presents forty such lists, taken from the Internet, each on a separate sheet of paper. The lists offer a powerful, suggestive glimpse into the lives of their authors, with hints about their age, gender, and circumstances. The items requested range from the most broad and basic, such as “School,” to the minutely specific, such as “VideoNow Color Disks 3-Pack: Monster Garage 2.”  Individually and collectively, the wish lists reveal how we are shaped by the things we live with and long for—both necessary and not.

Wish Lists, winning Sherman the 2006 James and Audrey Foster Prize, is the first fully text-based work acquired by the ICA/Boston. Though unique in its genre within the collection, it is in dialogue with a range of other works that incorporate found materials and deal with the issue of domesticity, such as those by Alexandre da Cunha, Ellen Gallagher, and Charles LeDray.

2007.3

Since the mid-1980s, Lorna Simpson has examined the interplay between fact and fiction, and identity and history, in photographic works that often combine text and image. Using both found images and studio photography, Simpson undermines assumptions about race and gender within American culture, subjecting these ideas to insightful reexamination.

The twelve parts shown here are a selection of works from Simpson’s series, May June July August ’57/’09, a body of work that, according to the artist, “critiques photography but also the power of imagery, and also the power of race and sexuality.” Made of 123 pairs of photographs, the series brings together two kinds of images: found pin-up images of young Black women (whom the artist identifies as aspiring actresses or models) in Los Angeles from 1957 and the artist’s recreation of these images that she made in 2009. The juxtaposition of the original photographs with Simpson’s mirrored own blurs the lines between history and art, creating a fictionalized narrative within which the depicted characters take part. Key to Simpson is the artifice inherent to the performances in these photographic pairs, and how performing, or posing, for the camera requires playing to notions of identity and the expectation of being seen. Part archival exploration and part performance, May June July August ’57/’09 is a complex investigation of history, femininity, and race.

800.13.04

Over the past twenty years, Steve McQueen’s moving-image works have developed from his iconic silent videos to powerful sound-driven works. In his films, he establishes exquisite, visceral relationships between moving bodies and the architectural spaces that surround or confine them—relationships that are complicated by the presence of viewers in gallery spaces. Questions of politics, race, and societal traumas and conventions haunt his taut structural scenarios.

A standout in the 2015 Venice Biennale, Ashes presents footage of a handsome, young, carefree fisherman named Ashes balancing playfully on a pitching boat on one side of a screen. A second video, projected on the other side, provides the film’s soundtrack and chronicles Ashes’s unexpected fate. Some of the footage was made for McQueen’s previous project, Carib’s Leap, 2002. McQueen, who is of Grenadian descent, based Carib’s Leap on a tragic episode in Grenada’s history, when hundreds of native Caribs leaped off a cliff rather than submit to the invading French. While making that work in Grenada, McQueen met the charismatic Ashes and felt compelled to film him. Projected on both sides of the screen, the footage of Ashes is shot in grainy, lush 8mm film. Meanwhile, the footage chronicling Ashes’s fate is shot in 16mm film, which registers the scenes with factual precision. The videos conjure an easy vitality alongside the darker forces of society and destiny. McQueen has remarked, “Life and death have always lived side by side, in every aspect of life. We live with ghosts in our everyday.”

Ashes joins other works in the ICA/Boston collection that deal with the complex matrix of globalism, economy, and deeply entrenched societal problems with formal innovation, including recently acquired works by Mika Rottenberg and Kara Walker, and a group of important sculptures by Doris Salcedo. The work debuts in the US at the ICA in February 2017.

2016.02

Louise Lawler explores the changing context in which works of art are viewed and circulated. Since the late 1970s she has worked primarily in photography and has become best known for shooting art objects in collectors’ homes, museums, auction houses, commercial galleries, and corporate offices, whether installed above copier machines or piled on loading docks and in storage closets. In these sites, she frames the strategies of display—from the works’ labels to their location—to bring attention to the ways spaces shape the meaning and reception of art after it leaves the studio. Her work is often associated with institutional critique for its exposure of art world machinations, and with the so-called Pictures Generation, a group of artists that includes Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and others, known for their strategies of appropriation. Witty and trenchant, Lawler’s photographs are more than mirrors in which the art world sees itself; they reposition the viewer to engage critically and affectively with art’s presentation and dissemination.

Grieving Mothers (Attachment) is part of a series in which Lawler documents casts of antiquities held by various international institutions. It depicts plaster casts of the wings of the Nike of Samothrace, c. 190 BCE, perhaps one of the most recognizable objects of Hellenic sculpture, in the collection of the Musée du Louvre in Paris. To further complicate the idea of originality and reproduction, the original marble has missing portions filled in with plaster. Lawler shows the wings detached from the figure’s torso, the mechanism of attachment visible. Due to the close cropping and angled framing, the viewer can perceive the wings as sculptural objects divorced from their grand and dynamic referent. In such pieces, Lawler complicates our perception of authenticity and its relationship to form.

Lawler’s Grieving Mothers (Attachment) builds on the ICA/Boston’s holdings of work by contemporary photographers, especially those who came of age artistically in the 1980s, such as Nan Goldin, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman. Moreover, it adds to the group of works by younger photographers who explore the ways three-dimensional forms can be captured through photography, such as Roe Ethridge, Erin Shirreff, and Sara VanDerBeek, many of whom consider Lawler a key figure in the development of their practices.

2015.16

In 1969, Robert Rohm’s manila rope reliefs were included in three important group exhibitions: Lucy Lippard’s 557, 087 at the World’s Fair Pavilion in Seattle; Marcia Tucker and James Monte’s Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and String and Rope at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. These three presentations defined the emerging movements of conceptual art, process art, and fiber art, respectively. In his rope reliefs, Rohm united the three currents by giving equal weight to issues of idea, process, and material. Knotted into grid shapes and darkened with a brown, oil-based wood stain, these netlike structures were nailed directly onto the gallery walls. Rohm then performed a sequence of simple, minimal interventions that drastically altered the appearance of the original grids.

Rohm divided his rope sculptures into three categories based on the gestures he executed. He made the first set by stretching or relaxing the rope; the second, by cutting it; and the third, by piling it. Gravity is the common denominator in the three groups. Untitled, 1969, is a knotted grid that exemplifies the first body of work. For this piece, Rohm tacked a rectangular net along its perimeter to the wall and then removed the nails along the top and right edges. He had anticipated that this would result in a crisp diagonal as with folded paper; instead, the rope slouched into an asymmetrical catenary curve. As it so often did, the material behaved contrary to Rohm’s prediction, introducing the element of chance.

Chance was also a factor in Rohm’s second and most influential series—rope grids he cut at predetermined points, such as Untitled, 1970. These cuts nearly always followed a logical pattern he had plotted on a preliminary diagram. Paradoxically, these methodical, orderly cuts caused the loose ends to dangle and droop into irregular, and at times even chaotic, new compositions. Rohm created a tension between rationality and randomness; after the grid’s connections were severed, its organized, geometric pattern devolved into disarray, illustrating the law of entropy that preoccupied many American artists during the 1970s.  The configuration of each sculpture provides the viewer with enough visual information to identify where Rohm sliced the grid and to mentally reconstruct the trajectory of the rope’s descent. “Visually, if it’s clear enough, one would read that that’s what happened,” he explains in an Artscanada article. “It’s not an illusion, it’s what actually did happen.”

Due to the ephemeral, disposable nature of Rohm’s early media, most of those early pieces were recycled or discarded soon after they were made. Like many important examples of conceptual and process-based works of the 1960s and ’70s, these two Rohm sculptures exist as instructions until they are realized in rope. Working with Rohm, and later his widow, Candy Adriance, the ICA/Boston obtained both the specific instructions for the works and recommendations of rope type. These works join other sculptures in fiber in the collection by artists such as Françoise Grossen and Sheila Hicks that appeared in Fiber: Sculpture, 1960—present, organized by Jenelle Porter, former Mannion Family Senior Curator, and enable the ICA to give a more complete art-historical story about approaches to process and material in sculpture of the 1960s and ’70s.

2015.29