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.

800.13.02

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

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

In the 1960s, a decade known for the ascension of minimalism, postminimalism, and conceptualism in sculpture, Eva Hesse was one of the most significant artists working in New York. Through the mid-to-late ’60s, Hesse used materials such as cord and rope, nets, plaster, steel, wood, papier-mâché, latex, rubber, and fiberglass to create forms that derived their structure from repetition and geometry but were executed with intuitive sensitivity. She made many important formal decisions in response to chance, gravity, randomness, and the circumstances of gallery architecture. Hesse created richly organic works that locate human tendencies, contradiction, and a dose of the surreal within the rigor of process-based conceptualism.

Ennead is composed of a thick, rectangular board gridded with three-dimensional papier-mâché hemispheres, with a single dyed string hanging from the center of each dome. The orderly, formulaic application of the threads devolves into an increasingly chaotic composition as they accumulate and tangle toward the floor. A few strands are affixed to the adjacent wall, cordoning off a wedge of space that becomes part of the sculpture itself. This gesture also draws the viewer’s attention to the corner of the gallery, activating this normally overlooked area. Additional material hangs to touch the floor, thus uniting three planes. “Ennead” means a group of nine, in this case referring to the nine points from which the strings extend.

Ennead is an important piece in the ICA/Boston’s collection of fiber works, including pieces by artists such as Françoise Grossen, Sheila Hicks, and Faith Wilding. Furthermore, Hesse’s work provides the foundation for the “loaded” material choices and conceptual relationship to the gallery’s architecture that inform works by younger artists as diverse as Taylor Davis, Tara Donovan, and Mona Hatoum, all of whom were influenced by Hesse and her cohort.

2015.15

Eva Hesse was one of the most important artists working in New York in the 1960s, until her untimely death in 1970. In constant dialogue with that decade’s most influential minimalist, postminimalist, and conceptual artists—including Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, and Ruth Vollmer—Hesse’s work reflected that circle’s emphasis on rigorously structured sculptural process and fabrication techniques, but also exemplified and in many cases influenced the group’s more corporeal, psychologically loaded, and, to use the critic Lucy Lippard’s term, eccentric strains that ran through postminimalism and process art, and continue to resonate in contemporary sculpture today.

Part of Hesse’s prodigious experimental art making includes the Accession series, created from 1967 to 1968, four iterations of which are extant today. With this series, Hesse created one of the decade’s most radical and psychologically resonant bodies of work based on the primary form of the cube. In each sculpture, rubber tubing is threaded through perforations in the walls of a cube open at the top. The rigidity and aggressively protective exterior walls are subverted by the formal and material complexity of the rubber tubing, with its slick surface, hollow interior, and biomorphic behavior. The smallest in the series, Accession IV has a dense interior space that forcefully underscores the differences between outside and inside, steel and rubber. One of Hesse’s best-known forms, it is an exemplar of postminimalist sculpture, fusing repetition, geometry, and industrial materials with media and processes that suggest the complexity of human experience and the psychically loaded spaces of our built environment.

Accession IV is an important representation of minimalism and conceptualism within the ICA/Boston collection. Hesse’s work provides the foundations for the “loaded” material choices and conceptual relationship to the gallery’s architecture (why a work sits on the floor instead of a pedestal, for instance) in works by younger artists as diverse as Taylor Davis, Tara Donovan, and Mona Hatoum, all of whom have responded to Hesse’s influence and the art history it represents.

2015.14