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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

Erin Shirreff’s work in sculpture, photography, and video investigates the distorting effects of memory and perspective on the experience of viewing art. Shirreff mines the distance between the general and the specific, employing a pared-down vocabulary of modernist forms to inhabit the space between an art object and our recollection of it. Her works explore the problematic nature of the photographic index as well as the medium’s relationship to the mechanisms of vision and perception. Her investigation often assumes the form of manipulated photographs of objects that are created explicitly to be photographed and then destroyed. By bending, folding, or bifurcating the printed photograph, Shirreff creates new forms, challenging the perception of photography as static and objective.

Catalogue, 39 Parts (Value Lessons) exemplifies Shirreff’s ability to employ the essence of modernist sculpture to new effect. Comprised of an arrangement of smooth, gray geometric Hydro-Stone elements arranged atop a series of level surfaces, the sculpture alternately resembles a table, workbench, and desk. The “legs” of the horizontal planes are simplified geometric forms also culled from the visual lexicon of twentieth-century sculpture. The title references the ubiquitous nature of the forms in relation to the history of art: the objects strewn on multiple surfaces—arcs, cylinders, and cones—represent what Shirreff considers the building blocks or “blanks” of modernist sculpture. By bringing these modules together, Shirreff highlights their universality and interchangeability. Here Shirreff seeks not only to blur the line between our memory and the actuality of experience, but also to blur the divide between the functional and the aesthetic.

Catalogue, 39 parts (Value Lessons) is a singular addition to the ICA/Boston’s permanent collection, augmenting the museum’s holdings in twenty-first-century sculpture by female artists and accompanying other significant sculptural works of abstract sculpture by Taylor Davis, Tara Donovan, and Josiah McElheny.

2015.06

Doris Salcedo distorts the familiarity of everyday objects, transforming domestic furniture into menacing statements of violence, mourning, and trauma. The artist has made powerful sculptures and installations since the mid-1980s that build on the memories and testimonies of victims of political persecution during the civil war in her native Colombia.

In Untitled, 2004–05, Salcedo displaces the imagery of household chairs, modifying their form and function while adding new layers of significance. This work is part of a larger series in which she evokes the violence of state interrogation techniques practiced by corrupt governments. To produce these works, Salcedo made wax models of the sculpture and collaborated with a New York-based factory to create the stainless steel models. The chair, once a support for the body, is presented as a disabled form—missing backs and battered corners—that speak to brutal and violent actions.

Untitled, 2004–05, joins a number of sculptures by Salcedo in the ICA/Boston’s collection. It augments the museum’s holdings of works that investigate themes of war and violence by such artists as Mona Hatoum, Willie Doherty, and Yasumasa Morimura.

2014.36

Jack Pierson is a multidisciplinary artist who addresses the tragedy and comedy of the struggle for public recognition and fame. Using photography, drawing, painting, installation, and sculpture, he engages symbols that communicate the folly and artifice of glamour. Often trafficking in clichés and hackneyed aphorisms, Pierson’s ironic oeuvre draws attention to both the fleeting nature of fame and the perception that one must die young and beautiful in its service. The artist is perhaps most recognized for his public “signs”—large-scale, brightly lit words such as “paradise,” “maybe,” or “lust” created from a hodgepodge of discarded building signage of varying typefaces and styles—that could equally be concrete poetry or ransom note.

The small sculptural work Applause is a re-creation of the sign used in television studios to direct audiences to clap at predetermined moments during tapings of a show. With the deadpan, satirizing gesture of transforming the mechanism into art, Pierson skewers the manipulation intended to heighten the secondary audience’s enjoyment. By editioning the re-created sign, he further vitiates its original on-site function and hence its meaning. The electric sign flashes on and off in a slow rhythm that mimics the pulsing adulation associated with the entertainment industry.

Applause enhances the ICA/Boston’s growing collection of conceptual sculpture, which includes works by Thomas Hirschhorn, Roy McMakin, and Damian Ortega. The work joins other sculptural work in dialogue with the forms and symbols of popular culture.

2014.08

Casting realistic, slightly under-life-size human figures in bronze, Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz was interested in the transitory moments when the viewer contrasts what is recognizable from what is unknown to create, in his words “a wide distance between the spectator and the object.” During a four-week residency in 1995 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Muñoz created a series of objects that responded to a work in the museum’s collection, the Gentile Bellini miniature Portrait of a Seated Turkish Scribe or Artist (1478–80). Muñoz’s Portrait of a Turkish Man, a larger representation of the seated scribe, draws from a speculative narrative developed in the drawing. Other works included in the Gardner exhibition was a sound installation that involved a stereo speaker floating in the Muddy River across the street from the museum. The speaker, visible from the second-story window of the Early Italian Room where Muñoz’s sculpture was installed, transmitted a voiceover from an Arabic speaker, transforming Muñoz’s sculpture into an open-mouthed vessel.

2014.07

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.

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