Saturday, April 2, 2016

Park McArthur at Chisenhale

Park McArthur, Contact V (2015). Courtesy of the artist and ESSEX STREET, New York and Lars Friedrich, Berlin. Photo: Andy Keate.
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Salves, balms, ointments, bandages, cushions, condoms, bumpers, foam, wraps, loading dock ramps, a pathos in the materials we find to mediate our touch to the world. Foam which evaporates, disintegrating merely with exposure. Heat as replacement for warmth. Darwin, living in the 1800s, could see a flower and draw a moth undiscovered until after his death. The objects here, designed for ourselves, in a similar way infer something about the bodies which they govern. A way for an object to "speak" without resorting to symbolism or surrealism, but objects which exist as a circumstantial evidence of a reality. These accumulations are tragedies of a world we must continually attenuate. A growing number of mostly women sculptors seem attuned to this.


See too: Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum WolfsburgKlara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at KuratorNancy Lupo at 1857, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps