There is a system of interconnected concepts expressed through steel–the skyscraper, the automobile, modernity itself. Bearing its own language and history, it’s also the “steel trap,” the “steel hand in the velvet glove,” the “city forged from steel.” Combining the social and the utilitarian, steel is both actual and metaphorical, laden with associations that elevate it above its materiality. Like all construction materials–wood, Sheetrock, concrete– steel possesses a dumb factuality that converts to something ambiguously aesthetic when it’s used as an art material. The earliest strategies of Modernism involved pulling the stuff of construction into the household, gallery, and museum, where it lost its utilitarian silence and made a lot of noise, radiating meanings. Monika Sosnowska’s work could almost drown itself in that noise, except that her objects and installations occupy a far more interesting conceptual space than that of art history, referencing and critiquing Modernism’s most utilitarian manifestations–mid-century Brutalist architecture. …see the entire article in the print version of sept’s Sculpture magazine.
