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Jessica Jackson Hutchins’s hybrid objects transform everyday life into art, creating sculptural installations, collages, paintings, and ceramics that evince the presence of human use. “Transformation, evidence of work, accidents, the time contained in the humanity of the objects,” says Hutchins, “all that stuff is crucial to get at what I’m trying to get at, which is ways of connecting to the world, ways of knowing ourselves through the things we encounter.”

A key early work, and one of Hutchins’s first major sculptures to incorporate her own ceramics, Convivium combines slumping, hand-worked ceramic vessels and a sinuous papier-mâché armature on top of a kitchen table. The organic papier-mâché form—adorned with a collage of flower imagery that echoes the tablecloth’s embroidery—holds Hutchins’s ceramics in a delicate balance. The work’s title refers to a Roman feast modeled off an Etruscan custom, which itself was a version of the Greek symposium. The convivium emphasized living together and was embedded in social and familial structures. It differed from earlier Greek prototypes in marked ways, for instance, by including women citizens. Hutchins is deeply invested in mythologizing the everyday, and given the near-ubiquitous presence of ceramics in everyday life in ancient Greece and Rome, she says that her use of the medium gives her a type of access to those ancient cultural traditions. Importantly, working with ceramics allows Hutchins to think about vases, cups, and other vessels as simultaneously both sculptures and objects of common use, productively blurring the line between life and art. Similarly, the family’s kitchen table is reimagined as a pedestal, still charged with sentiment and marked from daily use. A unique assembly of handmade and found objects, Convivium commemorates the central role of ritual in everyday life.

Hutchins had her first solo museum presentation at the ICA in 2011. Building on the collection’s strength in diverse forms of craft, Convivium joins works by Liz Larner and Ron Nagle as part of a developing interest in works made by key artists working with ceramics.

Working at the intersection of sculpture and video, New York-based artist Josh Kline raises salient questions about the impact of technological innovations on human bodies, while confronting issues of labor, corporate culture, and the politics of privilege and control. Saving Money with Subcontractors (FedEx Worker’s Head) is part of a group of sculptures in which 3-D printed body parts of FedEx workers are displayed in a FedEx box filled with packing peanuts.

In 2014, Kline began making 3-D scans with a DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) camera, a photographic process in which hundreds of images are taken of an individual subject from different perspectives. These images are then composited and 3-D printed. Kline took FedEx delivery drivers as a subject—specifically the individuals who delivered regularly to his studio—with a critical interest in commenting on how FedEx employees, and other third-party contractors, are regularly denied full benefits. In Saving Money with Subcontractors, the worker’s disembodied head is 3-D printed three times, once according to his real-life appearance, and twice more with his features overprinted with FedEx logos, bar codes, and documents. They rest on a bed of cast urethane foam packing peanuts also formed from the driver’s head, lending the work a surreal quality that also reads as a portrait of contemporary corporate subjugation. According to Kline, the technique of compositing fragments resonates with how companies and government agencies collect information about people: “Fractured aspects of our lives accumulating in different databases, creating subtly different portraits.”

Kline’s Saving Money with Subcontractors and Frank Benson’s Juliana (2014–15)—both included in the 2018 exhibition Art in the Age of the Internet—bolster the museum’s strong holdings in sculpture, and represent new technological developments in the medium through 3-D scanning and printing.

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Josiah McElheny is known for sculptural installations of handmade glass objects in precisely designed vitrines, pedestals, or wall units. They are often accompanied by explanatory texts, documentation, or titles that reflect on the origins of traditional craft and design, their role in the history of modern aesthetics, and the ideologies these aesthetics project.

Included in the major exhibition Josiah McElheny: Some Pictures of the Infinite at the ICA in 2012, Halo after Botticelli features a wall-mounted, circular glass object juxtaposed with a framed reproduction of a portion of Sandro Botticelli’s painting Virgin and Child with an Angel (1470–74). A three-dimensional reimagining of the diaphanous halo that appears atop the Virgin Mary’s head in Botticelli’s painting, the handmade glass object is studded with a network of gold stars that refracts light against the wall, suggesting the heavenly matter of the halo, which itself refracts celestial power in order to identify a figure of divine influence. As a sculptural translation of Renaissance iconography, Halo after Botticelli also acknowledges the genealogies of influence within the history of Western art.

Halo after Botticelli represents an important early strain of McElheny’s work, a strong complement to another of his works in the ICA collection, the mirrored sculptural tableau Czech Modernism Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely (2005).

2019.01

Michelle Grabner’s work unfolds across multiple platforms and in various media, united by a feminist politics that often focuses on domestic items as a means of generating new models of abstraction. A committed teacher, curator, and writer, as an artist she is well-known for her painted abstractions based on such everyday textiles as tablecloths, bed linens, and baby blankets.

Since 2015, she has developed a new body of bronze sculptures based on casts of the hand-crocheted and knitted blankets that she uses as templates for her abstract paintings. To create these works, Grabner makes wax positives of the blankets, and then pours molten bronze into the molds, burning out both the fabric and wax, thereby sacrificing the original textile. Untitled features a small, square blanket that drapes elegantly between two points, recalling the textile’s original soft, pliable form, which is here remade to stand freely. Its scale relates to the human body, and by extension to the original comfort, warmth, and care provided by the blanket. The play between hard and soft, metal and textile, practical handicraft and art object, all point to how subtly Grabner inflects her work with feminist politics, locating the heroic within the quotidian. In their sophisticated layering of meanings, Grabner’s works invite a different kind of attention to traditional and craft-based artistic practices, themselves often passed down within families.

This work joins other sculptures in the ICA’s collection by artists such as Nari Ward, Mark Dion, and Mona Hatoum, which employ found objects and domestic items. It also speaks to the ICA’s collection of textile-based sculpture by artists such as Josh Faught, Sheila Hicks, and Faith Wilding.

2019.04

For more than thirty years, Los Angeles-based artist Liz Larner has experimented broadly with an array of sculptural materials—from fiberglass, aluminum, and stainless steel to clay, agar, and minerals—in order “to shape our awareness of [materials] by either increasing or destabilizing how we understand them,” says Larner. While already well-established as an artist, in the late 1990s Larner began to audit Ken Price’s ceramics courses at the University of Southern California. Price was a disciple of the influential artist Peter Voulkos, who taught briefly at Black Mountain College and defined a unique approach to nonutilitarian ceramics. From Price, Larner learned the basics of slab building, glazing, and firing that would inform her unique experimentations with clay.

In 2011, Larner debuted a series of large, wall-mounted ceramic slabs coated in pigmented epoxy, and more recently began a series she calls Calefaction. These works consist of slabs of clay embedded with rocks and minerals the artist gathered while making Public Jewel (2015), an outdoor sculpture commissioned for the plaza of the Byron Rogers Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Denver, Colorado. ii (calefaction subduction) is an earthy green, elliptical object with inset stones and minerals, composed of two overlapping “plates.” Indeed, subduction is a geological term that refers to the tectonic process when the edge of one crustal plate descends below the edge of another. Calling to mind a range of geological phenomena (including clay’s origins as earth itself) and scales of time beyond those of a single human life, Larner’s ceramics express her deeply held tenet that sculpture “is a medium that can address how our world is produced and the factors that go into forming it.”

Larner joins other artists in the ICA’s collection, such as Nancy Graves, Mark Dion, and Sam Falls, whose work takes the natural world as subject, and ii (calefaction subduction) complements other contemporary ceramic works by Ron Nagle as part of a developing interest in the medium.

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As artist, performer, and musician, New York-based artist Raúl de Nieves constructs richly fashioned figurative sculptures, which reference traditional Mexican costumes, and are in combinatorial interplay with drag, ballroom, and queer club cultures, while playfully nodding toward religious and circus attire. All of his works share a distinctive visual language that draws from Mexican craft traditions, religious iconography, mythology, and folktales to explore the transformational possibilities of adornment and the mutability of sexuality and identity. Fina Vision is one of a series of figurative sculptures de Nieves created in honor of his mother, Josefina, who he frequently venerates as a savior-like figure and who moved her three sons from Mexico to San Diego, California, when de Nieves was nine years old.

The original installation of Fina was populated by several sculptures standing, sitting, or reclining on a mirrored ziggurat, each the embodiment of a different personality trait of his mother. Beauty, fantasy, emotional nourishment, and joy are given physical form through de Nieves’s trademark accumulation of beads, sequins, metal balls, and trim on top of a vintage military suit that can be worn in a performance. Fina Vision is dedicated to Josefina’s sense of foresight, here imagined as a glittering, jewellike reclining figure with a face made of pearly white beads with bright red lips and a black-and-blue outfit with bright pink flowers, gold ringlets, silver paisleys, and sequin-encrusted shoes. As in much of his work, de Nieves transforms highly personal narratives into vibrant amalgamations of form and material, all rendered in an energetic and accessible visual language.

Dayanita Singh is a Delhi-based photographer and visual artist who over a three-decades-long career has shifted and expanded traditional notions of photography. A graduate of both the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, and the International Center of Photography in New York, Singh began her career in photojournalism and documentary photography before turning to the material and history of the medium itself. Overall, Singh explores photography’s relationships to other media, initially gaining attention for her so-called book-objects: photographs that are assembled and edited in book form to interrogate both the book as a visual medium and the constructed nature of the archive.

In recent years, Singh has begun producing mobile museums of photographic images that can be edited, arranged, sequenced, and displayed in numerous configurations within modular wooden units. BV Stairs is one of the newest iterations of this signature practice. Composed of a wooden stool and a pillar designed to encase up to twenty photographs of various staircases, the work extends the visual experience of photography into the field of architecture, where the photographic image itself builds up and constructs the three-dimensional sculpture. BV Stairs further honors Indian modernist architect Balkrishna Doshi, whose style is marked by his belief that architecture should be a living form, one that is responsive to and evolves with the needs of people and nature. Doshi’s interest in architecture’s mutability—the inherent openness of the built environment and the necessity to adapt its form over time and due to need—is echoed in Singh’s pillar, also designed to be encountered and studied in the round with interchangeable photographic components. In this way, Singh’s photographs appear to exceed fixed references but offer creative and imaginative relationships that renew themselves in every exhibition.

Rose B. Simpson’s artistic practice spans ceramic sculpture, metals, performance, installation, writing, and automobile design, offering evocative reflections on the human condition. Her figurative ceramic sculptures, for which she is best known, often include metal, wood, leather, fabric, and found objects, and they express complex psychological states, spirituality, women’s strength, and postapocalyptic visions of the world. The daughter of sculptor Roxanne Swentzell, to whom she apprenticed, Simpson calls forth Indigenous knowledge and curative aspects of working with clay so as to heal generational trauma, and foster an internalized notion of sustainability. An enrolled member of the Pueblo of Santa Clara, New Mexico (Khaap’o Owingeh), Simpson draws on processes of producing clay pottery in practice since the sixth century and distinct methods of firing and formation, connecting tradition and knowledge with her own place in the world.

Countdown III was part of a major commission of new works for the Savannah College of Art and Design at Atlanta, Georgia. The sculpture extends the artist’s signature treatment of the human figure, with its tactile, heavily worked ceramic surface to a totemic scale. Adorned with leather, string, and a long necklace of ceramic beads, the standing and armless torso faces a wall upon which its head rests, a pose freighted with emotional intensity. The ceramic head and body are held upright by a metal armature visible in the elongated neck and pointed metallic feet the sculpture balances on. Originally installed in a row of glass windows, the series title, Countdown, connects the notion of seriality with our present time, prompting reflection on accumulation, anticipation, renewal, and uncertainty regarding the future. Captivating and yet unsettling, Countdown III is a tremendous example of how Simpson creatively taps into urgent concerns with deep wisdom and self-awareness, advancing her effort at “building awareness around the energy of colonization, around indigenous culture, bodies, and place.”

The multifaceted practice of New York-based interdisciplinary artist, performer, and musician Raúl de Nieves ranges from stained glass-style narrative paintings, to energetic performances, to densely adorned figurative sculptures, which are encrusted with bangles, beads, bells, sequins, and other homespun materials. These opulent, joyful sculptures reference traditional costumes from Mexican cultures and modes of dress, from drag, ballroom, and queer club cultures, while also evoking religious processional attire and the outfits worn by circus performers. All of his works share a distinctive visual language that draws from Mexican craft traditions, religious iconography, mythology, and folktales to explore the transformational possibilities of adornment and the mutability of sexuality and identity.

The Fable, which is composed of wonders, moves the more represents a turning point in de Nieves’s practice: for the first time, he has made a life-size, freestanding, figurative sculpture of an animal. De Nieves constructed the work through the same accumulative, labor-intensive sculptural process that the artist often employs in his practice, in which layer upon layer of beads, bells, sequins, and other readily available materials are built up to create a riotously colorful and symbolically expressive object. As well as drawing on the recurrent motif of animals in his work, de Nieves repeatedly returns to the legend of Saint George and the Dragon, in which the saint, mounted on horseback slays a dragon who is terrorizing a village by demanding constant tributes. Evoking fables—the literary genre in which animals are often anthropomorphized to illustrate a lesson, as well as the genre by which philosophers often explored ideas of wonder and morality—The Fable … expands the artist’s inventive adaptation of iconographic traditions in a vibrant amalgamation of form and material.

Over the past two decades, Simone Leigh has created an expansive body of work in sculpture, video, and performance that centers Black femme interiority. Inflected by Black feminist theory, Leigh’s practice intervenes imaginatively to fill gaps in the historical record by proposing new hybridities. In 2022, the ICA commissioned Leigh to represent the United States at the 59th Venice Biennale from April 23 to November 27, 2022. Entitled Sovereignty, the exhibition featured a new body of work that collectively extends the artist’s ongoing inquiry into the theme of self-determination. Many of the featured sculptures interrogated the extraction of images and objects from across the African diaspora, exploring the potential for hybrid relationships and associations in the meeting between disparate geographies, traditions, and aesthetics within the work. Of the works presented in Sovereignty, the large-scale ceramic sculpture Jug references numerous investigations Leigh has made throughout her artistic practice. The work draws primarily on the face vessel, a type of object made in the American South by both enslaved and freed African American artisans in Edgefield District, South Carolina, a region renowned for the production of stoneware. These enigmatic face vessels might have functioned in ritual or religious practices, or as coded objects that disguised hidden meanings. For this interpretation, Leigh rescaled the traditional face vessel in the five-foot-tall Jug, the surface to which she has appended forms resembling cowrie shells. One of the world’s oldest forms of currency, cowrie shells are a significant recurring motif in Leigh’s practice, from her earliest table-top ceramics to her monumental suspended sculptures and scaled raffia works. In modeling the face of her large-scale jug with the cowrie visage, Leigh fuses numerous aesthetic languages and homages to ceramic traditions in a relationship that crosses time and history.