SEATTLE Traver Gallery Cocked (2020), with its cage of interlocking steel rods, summons up the classical sculptural convention of contrapposto; bending to one side, the viewer vicariously enters into dialogue with the captive figure, complete with black cast-iron ears.
Eugene Macki
PITTSBURGH Mattress Factory Without a doubt, it is the visitor who is destined to activate this uncanny field of objects and to find meaning through his or her own experience and reimagining. As Ilya Kabakov has said: “The main actor in a total installation, the main center toward which everything is addressed, for which everything is intended, is the viewer.”
Lori Goodman and Teddy Milder
EUREKA AND BENECIA, CALIFORNIA The Barn Gallery and Arts Benecia collective grief—in memoriam packs more than 100 boxy forms made of handmade paper onto a low, nine-by-12-foot plinth to create an aggregation of structures that recall the apartment buildings and office towers of every midsize city around the world—all of them similar, no two exactly alike.
The Agency of Things: A Conversation with Juan Ortiz-Apuy
The human hand’s ability to touch, display, gesture, and manipulate materials forms the core of Coming to Grips, Juan Ortiz-Apuy’s current installation at YYZ Artists’ Outlet in Toronto.
Fragile Times: A Conversation with Nataliya Zuban
Though Nataliya Zuban is steeped in the traditional ceramic production of her native town of Opishnia (known as the ceramic capital of Ukraine), she applies her deep understanding of material and process in strikingly unconventional ways as a window into natural processes.
Daphne Wright
OXFORD, U.K. Ashmolean Museum In Wright’s colorless, spectral ensembles, each object has an equal status within the ritual of daily life. Her sons are no more significant than the sofa and floor that support them; the food in the fridge, though indicative of essential sustenance, of no higher value than the unit that contains it.
Rebellious Subjects: A Conversation with Reza Aramesh
Tehran-born, London-based Reza Aramesh describes his choice of subject matter as “necessary for the moment we are in.” Neither protest not political crusade, his figures of anonymous men explore violence in its most banal and insidious forms.
Berenice Olmedo
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA BAMPFA Using what she describes as discarded devices intended for replacement, correction, and support as a primary material, Olmedo constructs hauntingly beautiful, defiantly non-normative figurative sculptures.
Solange Pessoa
GLASGOW Tramway Pessoa’s choice of “Pilgrim Fields” as the exhibition title beautifully captured the feeling of earthy spirituality encapsulated by this low-lying sculptural landscape, while at the same time evoking journeys and the interconnectedness of our world.
Let It Go: A Conversation with Ryan Schneider
Ryan Schneider, who until recently was best known for his heavily built-up paintings, takes almost the opposite approach to sculpture, following Constantin Brancusi who argued that “one should know how to dig out the being that is within matter.”
