Woolwich, Maine
The copy, the fake, or the reproduction that attempts—with differing degrees of seriousness and in distinct emotional keys—to beguile or deceive a viewer is not a new sculptural idiom, but it does have the power to fruitfully reflect and engage contemporary anxieties. This is borne out not only by the number of artists recently working within these loose parameters—Susan Collis, Zoe Sheehan Saldaña, Kaz Oshiro, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, and Hany Armanious, among others—but also by the surprising diversity of their output. Each has crafted work that sows confusion between an object and its surface, process and product. Each in their own way also asks: What does it mean to still make an object by hand? In the group exhibition “You Don’t Know Me” (on view through November 23, 2024, by appointment), Carly Glovinski, Justin Richel, Rachel Grobstein, and Duncan Hewitt offer four evocative rejoinders to the question. More still are raised: Is an object its appearance, its surface, its matter? How it’s used? The memories it holds?
The artists together proposed the exhibition to curator and gallerist Sarah Bouchard; between the works on view, like among friends, there is group dialogue and there are side conversations. Justin Richel’s works generate the greatest discrepancy between surface and content, or first impression and material reality. They are also the most slapstick. His re-creations of the trappings of studio life—including 11 wall-mounted brushes, an easel, a step ladder and paint cup, a broom, and a blaze-orange level, leaning against the wall—are so formally convincing in scale, color, form, and texture that it would be understandable to miss that they are actually fully constructed copies, created “simply” with wood, canvas, and paint. The back of the easel, for example, shows the canvas’s scramble of staples on its wood frame; the work is, in effect, half an easel with a hollow core. Again facing the front (as if you were the painter): a well-loved looking brown easel, canvas thoroughly buried by layers of acrylic, casein, gouache, and enamel.
The handpainted label on Richel’s paint cup reads, ironically, “Painting just got easier!” The same could be said of Rachel Grobstein’s miniature still lifes, which share a sense of Richel’s playfulness, at least initially. Presented on small floating square shelves in three groupings, they are fashioned primarily from gouache, paper, clay, and balsa wood. They average no more than about six inches in any direction. But the Polly Pocket scale generates a surprising and affecting juxtaposition with the works’ content. Titles from the newest series on view (all 2024) narrate a series of enormous transitions the artist has recently experienced: Kitchen Table (Separation), Pumping (Lunch Break), Studio (Miscarriage). In the last work, carefully arranged on the shelf (the artist uses tweezers), are items typical of a studio workspace: cutting board, cups of pencils and brushes, crumpled mock-up, pad of paper, lighter. What looks like a tableau of ordinary studio mess doubles as a psychological portrait, in that an event out of frame is the true subject. Though responding to something intensely private, the generosity of the work lies in the fact that it captures a near universal feeling: that of staring at one’s desk, trying to work, while your mind is elsewhere.
Grobstein’s works, with their combination of the mundane and intimate, contain all the specificity of the people they stand in for—as a result, they never get repetitive. Part of her “Roadside Memorials” series, Memorial (S 56th Street) (2019) re-creates a sidewalk memorial the Philadelphia-based artist photographed in New York. Among the customary candles, flowers, and toys (including three Spidermen figurines and various Sesame Street characters), fallen leaves, debris, and alcohol have migrated into the scene, as if sucked into the assembled mass of objects. There are soot marks up the sides of the candles. A private loss becomes a public memorial, remade here just at the threshold of its fading.
Nearby, Maine-based sculptor Duncan Hewitt’s pair of carved wooden curtains is also an aperture between public and private life. Coming to about chest height, with the rough-hewn marks of carving tools, they are just parted in the center, with folds hitting the floor like a pair of mismatched feet. On the one hand, the petrification of what should be a loose, fluid material feels stifling; on the other, the arrested form, re-created, can be fully admired.
In Library (2017–18) and References (2024), Carly Glovinski has painted trompe l’oeil book jackets onto chunky wooden blocks, displayed on narrow shelves. (Grobstein, Richel, and Glovinski have all re-created books in the show.) Their painted barcodes reveal that they’re library copies; titles including Native Plants of the Northeast, Walden, and The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art, and Architecture offer a glimpse into the artist’s interests and creative sources. Books sans content, they are raised to the level of devotional objects.
That there are only objects on view, and that they are tools of creative, domestic, and intellectual life and labor, points to an optimism, in critic Lauren Berlant’s sense of the word, about making itself. If, as Berlant says, “all attachment is optimistic, if we describe optimism as the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world,” the works reflect a site of negotiation between personal anxieties—about domesticity, tedium, time, creativity, consumerism, utopianism, intimacy—and (re-)engagement with life. The relatively simple materials employed here are animated by the artists through bricolage, not engineering, and the undertow of material anxiety about contemporary production and waste encounters a strong ethics of preservation, an effort to arrest loss.
