Rachel Perry Welty creates meticulously arranged, often language-based sculpture. you may already be a winner, the titular relief of her recent solo show at New York’s Yancey Richardson Gallery, crafts a single sheet of aluminum foil into a continuous line of cursive script. The source material is the subject line of a spam message. The artist characterizes this work as “spam wrapped as leftovers.”
Welty first received critical attention for her video Karaoke Wrong Number (2004), which is now in the permanent collection of Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, where she was a finalist for the Foster Prize in 2006. Her obsessive mapping of her personal life and daily rituals is fascinating, and her ability to organize huge quantities of throwaway materials is impressive. Her fascination with branding and commodification is exemplified by neat configurations of handmade, miniature supermarket items, which claim allegiance to Warhol’s use of iconic packaging and to Gabriel Orozco’s reliance on the mutability of mundane forms. …see the entire article in the print version of November’s Sculpture magazine.
