San Francisco
Understanding and appreciating the works in Rebecca Manson’s “Time, You Must Be Laughing” requires a consideration of labor and scale, two metrics often used to assess the aesthetic and marketplace success of contemporary art. Three different bodies of work were presented here, connected by their use of ceramic, as well as their focus on a potent mixture of beauty and mortality.
Over the past several years, Manson has created a number of immersive installations incorporating drifts of thousands of colorful, life-size, fallen “leaves” made from clay. These are punctuated with clusters of ceramic flowers and occasional stand-ins for the figure, with objects including a barbecue grill, a ladder, and tools deliberately reinforcing the work’s intended relationship to the body. The Swing (2022–25), a rickety-looking swing set modeled on one from Manson’s childhood, was the only piece here at this one-to-one scale. Small, sly details, from a bikini top draped over a side support to a trompe-l’oeil bag of Funyuns tucked into a garland of autumnal leaves, suggest a backstory. The two swings, magically frozen in mid-flight, further evoke youth’s bittersweet ephemerality (also implied by the show’s title, taken from a Joni Mitchell song). The installation also might bring to mind Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s painting of a girl on a swing, suggesting lost innocence and sexual innuendo in a garden setting.
Two larger-than-life ceramic flowers on steel stems embedded in rough concrete bases represented another thread of Manson’s meditations on memento mori. But a third body of work dominated the show, representing vastly magnified butterfly wings, portrayed as discorporate fragments. Like Manson’s other works, these wings suggest the melancholy of passing time. Butterflies, as pretty as they are, evoke vanitas themes and traditions by embodying the fleeting nature of beauty.
Whether including a partial or complete set of wings sans insect body, each of these wall-mounted works contains hundreds of thousands of tiny ceramic elements, inevitably foregrounding the amount of time and effort that goes into Manson’s process, from the generation of the “smooshes” (as she calls the tiny smeared blobs of clay) to the repeated glazing and firing that takes place before they are glued onto an armature/substrate with a special flexible adhesive. Manson developed this combination of materials and techniques several years ago and has refined it to a high level. From a distance, the tiny ceramic elements create an almost mesmerizing shimmer of color, not unlike the light-catching microscopic scales of genuine insect wings. Up close, however, these dabs of clay are not quite as attractive; after one or two pieces have been examined to satisfaction, the larger ones are best viewed from a distance that allows details to merge into illusionistic patterns and overpowering scale to signal their prestige and power, much like the immense paintings favored by institutions and the uber-wealthy.
The problem with sculpture, of course—at least, in commercial terms—is that, as Ad Reinhardt once famously quipped, it is “something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.” Since most of these works hang on the wall, they obviate the problem of being, as Reinhardt suggests, excess to art world requirements. But the most baffling thing about the wing works isn’t that they are no longer, strictly speaking, sculpture. It’s that our relationship to them, in contrast to our place in Manson’s immersive installations, feels so indeterminate. Some of these pieces are small enough to relate to the human body—Opal (2025), for instance, measures a modest six feet at its largest dimension—but Exploding Butterfly’s 15-by-13-foot expanse dwarfs any observer.
Rather than the austere elegance conventionally exuded by high-end gallery exhibitions, “Time, You Must Be Laughing” felt crowded, suggesting the dense accumulation of a backroom archive. It’s hard to fault such a choice, though. To advance an ambitious career, artists must be ready to generate and show ample amounts of product, meeting the demands required by frequent exhibitions at multiple galleries and a punishing schedule of art fairs. While it is easy to say that a less-is-more approach might have better served artist and work in aesthetic terms, perhaps the strategy of this exhibition will turn out to be well suited in a world driven primarily by money and power.
