“The Potential of Objects” at Marin Museum of Contemporary Art
Artwork is usually the primary approach that we as a society grapple with collective trauma, and the occasions of the previous few years have offered a lot fodder for taking over isolation, sickness, dying, racial injustice, and warfare. Eschewing the didactic, “The Potential of Objects” is refreshing in its foregrounding of a return to materiality as a method of participating with bigger social points. After two years behind pc screens, we can not underestimate the visceral energy of experiencing sculpture in all its three-dimensional glory. The exhibition brings collectively eleven artists with ties to the Bay Space in an exploration of what political theorist Jane Bennett phrases vibrant matter, the concept a significant pressure exists in all bodily varieties, each human and nonhuman.
Coming into the primary of two galleries, we encounter an array of sculptures—on pedestals, suspended from the ceiling, freestanding, and hanging on the partitions. Music from Yemen and Ukraine offers a lo-fi soundtrack, emanating from Peter Simensky’s Pyrite Pirate Radio—pink hair I do not care, 2021, a useful work comprising digital elements and idiot’s gold (or pyrite, which has the power to seize AM audio transmissions) with sundry ornamental gildings, corresponding to strings of colourful wood beads and lavender-sequined material. The paradoxical mixture of aesthetically pleasing adornments with critical material is echoed in Demetri Broxton’s Save Me, Joe Louis, 2019–20, a pair of boxing gloves encrusted with cowrie shells and complicated beading. The title, stitched into the piece, references the final phrases of a Southern Black prisoner on dying row within the Thirties.
A number of artists incorporate on a regular basis objects with culturally particular approaches and supplies to complicate concepts surrounding identification. In Natani Notah’s haunting Hooked, 2022, a chunk of leather-based enhanced with Native American beadwork is sewn onto a discovered metallic hook, turning a mass-produced image of hazard and violence into one thing a lot stranger, richer, and emotionally advanced. The work additionally asserts the validity and superiority of Native American methods in modern artwork. Cathy Lu’s American Dream Pillows, 2020, are stylized porcelain masks that relaxation on blue packing blankets draped over cinder blocks. The works have been impressed by Tune and Tang dynasty ceramic pillows, designed to information desires. The distinction between the anticipation of a cushty mattress and the sculptures’ forbidding ambiance alerts a disconnect: between the false notion of the US as a spot the place prosperity and success are potential for anybody who comes right here, and the truth of the nation’s deep-rooted xenophobia and racism.
— Jeanne Gerrity
