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In a distinctive and powerful body of work, Charles LeDray (Born 1960 in Seattle) has employed diverse sculptural languages with materials such as needle-stitched cloth, carved human bone, and hand-thrown ceramics. In an era of high-tech production values, LeDray insists on a painstakingly manual fidelity that lends an air of deeply felt experience to his work. His diminutive sculptures transport viewers to moments of shared personal and cultural history, from childhood games to festive occasions.

LeDray learned to sew at home and intuitively developing his sense of the sculptural possibilities of vernacular forms and working most often at a micro scale. His objects carved from human bone are exquisitely rendered, with astonishing precision, to sixteenths of an inch. He creates ceramic pots that are smaller than many people’s fingers, yet technically perfect and extraordinary in their diversity. At the same time, LeDray’s work is in no sense “naïve”; he has studied and absorbed the most sophisticated art of the classical, modern, and contemporary periods.

Untitled is an assemblage of denim like fabric patches that covers a form suggestive of the body of a child, perhaps taking refuge or playing hide-and-seek. Possessing a compelling magnetism, the unique floor sculpture displays LeDray’s rigorous and virtuosic handwork. The artist works on pieces in meticulous detail over weeks and years, without the help of studio assistants. His process and techniques of sewing and carving recall the visionary work of folk and outsider artists.

Over the past decade, Thomas Hirschhorn (Born 1957 in Bern, Switzerland) has become known for ephemeral constructions he calls “displays” rather than “installations.” Often overflowing their museum or gallery environments, these works resemble shanties, makeshift altars, or department stores gone awry. To build his displays, Hirschhorn employs low or untraditional art materials—cardboard, packing tape, aluminum foil, plastic, and plywood—which are then layered with all manner of text and image: hand-scrawled slogans, clippings from newspapers and magazines, stacks of philosophy and political science books. The result is an intense and immersive interplay of ideas made physical.

Wood-Chain VIII (Pisa Tower) is a more discrete work than Hirschhorn’s usual production—but it is just as difficult to classify. Neither sculpture, relief, nor painting, the work resembles a giant necklace supporting a pendant made of wood inscribed with burned-in figuration and detail. Hirschhorn’s signature mode is to juxtapose different, sometimes incongruous, types of symbolism, making intellectual and political leaps that create rough collisions. Wood-Chain VIII (Pisa Tower) links or “chains” together a conversation about architecture and globalization—its tower is an oversized version of a memento that might be bought at a tourist gift shop, its wooden chain a reference to the gaudy jewelry of hip-hop or mafia dons colloquially named “bling” (for the “bling-bling” sound of the cash register). The work speaks to the circulation of architectural signs along the trashy byways of touristic commerce—not without irony, given Hirschhorn’s use of patently un-bling burnt wood. Branded on the pendant’s base is the phrase “Utopia, Utopia, One World, One War, One Army, One Dress,” the title of Hirschhorn’s 2005 exhibition at the ICA/Boston, which denotes the artist’s longtime preoccupation with the dystopian conflicts of globalization.

Damián Ortega (Born 1967 in Mexico City) is one of the most influential artists to emerge from the circle of contemporary artists working alongside Gabriel Orozco in Mexico City in the 1990s. His art exposes the underlying mechanisms and systems that make up familiar objects in the manmade and natural worlds. Ortega often disassembles and rearranges everyday objects in order to consider their elements, setting them out for scrutiny like a scientific diagram of the atoms in a molecule. His untraditional materials—tortillas, pennies, and used furniture—subvert traditional notions of sculpture.

Olympus references other works in Ortega’s oeuvre, such as the hanging installations of a disassembled Volkswagen Beetle (Cosmic Thing, 2003) and a grouping of hand tools (Controller of the Universe, 2007). In these installations, Ortega deconstructs a useful, familiar object—a common car and a toolkit—reinterpreting the way one can understand its parts and thus revealing a new relationship to the whole. In Olympus, Ortega takes apart a 35mm Olympus camera and suspends its component parts, secured within twenty-six clear plastic sheets, so that they appear to float in a row inside two cases. Ortega is fascinated by the study of vision and optics, and the relationships between seeing and technology. In Olympus, he deconstructs the mechanics of photography, stretching the camera’s zoom lens to absurd lengths as he tests the camera’s capacity for capturing an image from afar.

Olympus enhances the ICA/Boston’s growing collection of sculpture by important international artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Tara Donovan, Mona Hatoum, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Cornelia Parker.

Jason Middlebrook works in sculpture, drawing, painting, and installation to image the clash between nature and the built environment. In California, where the artist was raised, this is called the suburban/wildlife interface: a trouble zone where wildfires regularly decimate neighborhoods and where you might see a coyote trotting down the street. In these edge scenarios, humankind encroaches on nature. Middlebrook’s drawings depict weedy, trash-strewn hillsides teeming with avian life. Roughhewn wooden planks, looking like construction castoffs, are embellished with paint and varnish and lean against the wall like surfboards or minimalist sculptures.

In Finding Square, Middlebrook moves away from quasi-narrative depictions of decaying landscapes and toward abstract modes. A roughly hewn empty wooden frame speaks more to roadside handicrafts (chainsaw animal sculptures) than to fine art accoutrements. The molding is painted with concentric, deep umber-red geometric borders of diminishing width that suggest pictorial recession. These nested borders are evocative of Frank Stella’s groundbreaking early painting, Sol LeWitt’s drawn and painted lines, and Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square series. The frame is, therefore, a ground for painting; with timber substituting for stretched canvas, the painting is also object. The found object is readymade by nature—or, rather, by our manipulation of it. The interior space remains empty, making the wall on which it hangs the “picture” on display. Other works in this series are planks of similarly roughhewn wood, painted to highlight the wood grain or time-demarcating rings.

The addition of Finding Square to the ICA/Boston’s collection augments the strong holdings in works that elegantly merge the conceptual with the highly crafted, such as those by Taylor Davis, Charles LeDray, Josiah McElheny, and many others.

2012.1

Josiah McElheny’s installations of handmade glass objects in precisely designed vitrines, pedestals, or wall units with explanatory texts, documentation, or titles entice us to reflect on the origins of this traditional craft, the history of aesthetics it embodies, and the ideologies these aesthetics project. The product of an ancient technology that defies scientific classification as liquid or solid, glass is an amorphous medium ideally suited to McElheny’s presentation of classic stylistic forms as suspensions of unsettled ideals. Through them, seemingly absolute notions such as perfection, infinity, self-reflection, and utopia are recast as malleable artifacts subject to the forces of history and culture, the advances of art and science, and the contemporary context of their display.

In Czech Modernism Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely, a line of eight polished decanters is viewed through a sheet of one-way glass that reflects the enfilade in what appears to be endless recession into a horizon-less darkness beyond the limits of our vision. A close look at the surface of each object reveals its own reflection, which itself contains another, like a Russian nesting doll. This vacuum of containers-within-containers completely bereft of our own reflection is a vision of modernism devoid of the human element. The seamless landscape of shining forms entrances our senses but denies our presence, hinting at the dangers of infinite absolutes.

Striking for its craftsmanship and conceptual rigor, this perceptually stimulating piece provides a counterpoint to other sculptural works in the ICA/Boston’s permanent collection, such as Taylor Davis’s finely fabricated Untitled, 2001, and Mona Hatoum’s handworked Pom Pom City, 2002.

2006.4

Françoise Grossen’s work is central to the wave of innovations in fiber art that took place during the second half of the twentieth century. In describing her artistic development, Grossen summarizes two of the most important ways in which artists transformed fiber in the late 1960s: “First we broke with the rectangle, then we broke with the wall.” By exploring the sheer weight of rope and its response to gravity, Grossen aligned her work with broader artistic debates taking place in New York in the 1960s and ’70s.

Inchworm’s insistent horizontality is related to avant-garde dance, which during this period was moving from the stage to the floor, as well as to contemporaneous installations of scattered scraps of industrial felt and thread. While experimenting with scale, orientation, and composition, Grossen maintained two constants: her medium and her process. She has worked almost exclusively in rope, knotting and braiding it throughout her career; rather than inhibiting her, this self-imposed limitation has facilitated her sustained contemplation of rope’s material properties.

Inchworm is a classic example of fiber art, a movement the ICA/Boston has sought to bring to critical attention and recognition, in part through the major exhibition Fiber: Sculpture 1960—present (2014), and it joins other works in fiber in the collection, such as Josh Faught’s Untitled, 2009, and Faith Wilding’s Crocheted Environment, 1972/2005.

2015.05

Josh Faught’s sculptures are layered with seemingly contradictory elements that exist side by side: abstraction and representation, high art and kitsch, embarrassment and pride, and activism and disengagement. He invokes tensions by juxtaposing such incongruous materials as yarn, hemp, wool, linen, sequins, pins, and cast-off items ranging from self-help books to ceramic casts. He works these media using techniques that include crochet, collage, weaving, dyeing, and painting. The resulting assemblages offer critical commentary on the complexity of human relationships in the domestic sphere in which many of their components originate. His labor-intensive work draws on histories of gender and sexual politics, precariously balancing an urgent sense of anxiety with a nostalgic view of the present.

Untitled exemplifies Faught’s nonobjective work, generating visual interest primarily through shape, color, textural variation, and spatial effects. Segments of gray hemp are sewn together to form an approximate square, broken up by a swatch of woven indigo yarn in the upper right corner and a vertical band of burgundy sequins along the left edge. Crocheted barnacles line the bottom border and punctuate the center, and loose strands of yarn drip haphazardly across the surface. The entire textile is stretched over a wooden garden trellis like a canvas on an easel, inviting analogies with painting. The dangling, gestural threads subtly suggest the expressive brushstrokes of abstract expressionism, while the roughly rectilinear monochrome grid recalls the color field movement. For Faught, abstraction and activism are not mutually exclusive. He describes his artistic process as “constantly jamming together material histories until they become simultaneously abstract and narrative,” and notes that the evocative nature of his media enables his art to be simultaneously abstract and referential. Rather than illustrating his ideas, his work implies his agenda through playful puns on the materials. For example, the trellises that hold up Untitled symbolize social support systems, while their pointed posts suggest the idea of staking a claim or position. In some cases, Faught lashes together his own wooden armatures with survival knots—a metaphor for urgency and resilience. However, the allusions in his work are not always so direct. Sequins, for instance, suggest the performative nature of gender identity in general, and drag costuming in particular. Sequins, pins, and other memorabilia indirectly invoke gay countercultures and communities.

Untitled is a major work by this critically important yet under-recognized artist. The relation to works by Tara Donovan, Mona Hatoum, Sheila Hicks, and Faith Wilding in the ICA/Boston collection illustrates a way of making sculpture far outside the conventional trajectories of the medium’s history.

2014.02

Alexandre da Cunha uses utilitarian objects to mimic and embellish the gestures of historical abstraction. Mops pose on pedestals to impersonate Constantin Brancusi’s columns, baking trays dangle from curtain hooks in imitation of Alexander Calder’s mobiles, and toilet plungers masquerade as precious vases that slyly wink at Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. The concept of the “assisted readymade” Duchamp pioneered in 1913 is the foundation for da Cunha’s playful elevation of prosaic products. As a student, da Cunha was influenced by the modernist architecture of Rio de Janeiro and was educated in the sensuous geometries of Neo-concretism in São Paulo. Although he emigrated to London to pursue graduate work at the Royal College of Art and the Chelsea College of Art, and has lived there ever since, he embraces Brazilian aesthetic strategies of recycling, reuse, and improvisation.

Of the many household items he repurposes—beach towels, skateboards, deck chairs, hockey sticks, canvas awnings, flowerpots, and straw hats—da Cunha works most extensively with mop heads. Bust XXXV is part of his first body of work based on the mop, the series Busts, 2008–12. In these works, long strands of dyed wool are knotted to the ends of upside-down mops, the handles of which are planted in concrete plinths. Da Cunha’s title for the series signals the figurative presence of the mops and links them to a classical genre of sculpture. Mops symbolize cleaning, a process that da Cunha considers meditative and reinvigorating, though their deployment also alludes critically to the labor conditions of domestic and janitorial workers worldwide.

Bust XXXV was acquired from the landmark exhibition Fiber: Sculpture 1960—present at the ICA/Boston, along with works by Josh Faught, Françoise Grossen, and Sheila Hicks, and inscribes the exhibition program within the collection. Bust XXXV has additional resonance with figurative works in the collection by Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Harrison, and Eva Hesse.

2016.12

Since the early 1990s, multimedia artist and performer Nick Cave has been exploring the intersection of fine art, craft, performance, and material culture. He first gained widespread recognition in the art world for his Soundsuits—full-body costumes crafted from twigs, buttons, ceramic figurines, toys, and other objects he gathers from antique shops and flea markets. Cave first devised the Soundsuit as a protective “second skin” in 1991 in response to the racial profiling and beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers. More recently, he has expanded his artistic expression to include paintings and sculptures that adapt the material and formal applications invented for the Soundsuits.

Although he often displays Soundsuits as sculpture, Cave and others also wear them as sound-generating costumes for live performances, photographs, and videos. At the top of this appliquéd outfit is an elaborate chandelier structure containing dozens of ceramic birds and strings of plastic beads. The work epitomizes Cave’s lavish, baroque aesthetic, a mirror of our culture’s excess and a radical reinvention of contemporary sculpture and craft.

The presence of the work supports the museum’s critical examination of the role of craft in contemporary art as seen in other collection works by Josh Faught, Arlene Shechet, and Haegue Yang.

2016.32

Conceptually driven, Andrew Witkin’s artistic approach is both inspired by and nearly indistinguishable from his deliberate approach to life, work, and relationships. Witkin explains that his work “is and is not art, is and is not finished.” Though his projects have taken a wide range of formats, from large installations to more discrete objects, they all show his interest in repetition and open-endedness.

Untitled consists of 144 white T-shirts hung on hangers. The scene is a familiar one: a sea of mass-produced shirts, as you might see in a clothing store. Written in black on each shirt are short texts—quotes from authors and artists, a single word, or a terse phrase. They range from provocative (“something must happen”), ho-hum (“photos of friends”), and melancholic (“seeing a homeless man every day for weeks on beacon hill and then from one time on, he is gone”) to jovial (“hahahahahahaahahahahahahahah”). As viewers walk through the installation, their upper bodies are obscured by the hanging T-shirts and only their legs are visible, as if their individuality were masked by the shirts. The listing of collaborators, who include colleagues, friends, family, artists, and various cultural figures, is integral to Witkin’s work and further blurs the distinction between his artistic practice and his everyday life.

Witkin was the recipient of the 2008 James and Audrey Foster Prize, and as such, his work was exhibited at the ICA/Boston that year alongside that of the three finalists. Untitled presents a significant large-scale work by a young, Boston-based artist and joins works in the collection by Laylah Ali, Ambreen Butt, Taylor Davis, Kelly Sherman, and Rachel Perry. Furthermore, the repetitive and transformative use of everyday materials in Witkin’s work has a counterpart in Tara Donovan’s sculptures in the ICA’s collection.

2010.4