Pittsburgh
Founded as an institution “for artists, by artists,” the Mattress Factory has acted as a catalyst for hundreds of site-specific and process-driven works over the years, experimental projects that have consistently challenged perceptions about art and sculpture. It’s been some time though, since it has hosted a large-scale installation as visually and conceptually compelling as Eugene Macki’s evocative REIFICATION (on view through November 30, 2025). Alumni artists vanessa german, Sohrab Kashani, Christopher Meerdo, and Sarah Oppenheimer selected Macki, a multidisciplinary artist who divides his time between London and the U.S., through the Mattress Factory’s International Open Call program, recognizing his unique approach to art-making as a means to explore the unknown and defamiliarize the familiar.
Working across installation, sculpture, land art, experimental video, performance, and collaborative practice, Macki, who rejects gallery representation, has no fixed agenda for any given project. Instead, he looks to each new site as an opportunity to create an open-ended platform for discovery. There are no fixed answers or meanings in his work—only questions. He’s an investigator who draws on his international experiences to deal with the specificity of a place, and he welcomes working with a wide range of commonplace materials in unconventional ways. A kinship is apparent between his work and that of 1960s installation artists who focused on ideas and experiences rather than on formal objects or narratives.
Given Macki’s interest in archaeological sites and ritual, it is not surprising that a sense of mystery permeates REIFICATION. He explains that the ideas behind the installation draw from “the Terracotta Army of China and archaeological sites in Greece (that date back 5,000 years)…In 2023, I traveled to Athens for a research trip. Monuments were my main focus, but the physical remains of past human activities had a profound impact on me.”
Those enigmatic remains, surrounded by indefinite meanings and unknown answers despite their familiarity, became the focus of Macki’s abstracted construction, which creates its own site while responding to the architecture of the Mattress Factory. Entering the space, one immediately confronts a tripartite configuration, surrounded by walls rendered unfamiliar by a layer of thick, black rubber punctuated by geometric white cubes. Crafted glass barriers framing the front of the site offers an initial view of its contents, while a central opening provides physical access in the form of a semi-enclosed, inclined wooden passageway. From this vantage point, which runs the entire length of the room, viewers can survey more than 200 black, rubber-coated sculptures, which lie buried beneath an expanse of thousands of methodically cut, chipped cardboard pieces.
The journey through REIFICATION culminates on the far wall with three videos documenting a series of timed performances that Macki and his collaborator Michelle Boulé undertook in the empty space prior to the installation. Their moving figures and gestures stimulate the void with a visceral and physical presence, portraying the exploratory relationship between body and vacant space. A mental transformation ultimately takes place within this work as we start to trace connections between no-longer-present human actions and the objects that remain behind, as we begin to understand how Macki repurposes functional materials—or reifies them—stripping them of their usual practical use value in order for us to see them afresh and inspire new, unexpected relationships.
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.” This certainly applies to Macki’s installation. He has created an unusual site-work, filled with emotional potential, where stories and secrets lie waiting to be discovered, latent remains until an individual makes them concrete.
