Installation view: Asdfjkl; From left: Siren
Serenade, Signature Roll. Regen Projects, Los Angeles, May 27 - July 10,
2010.
LOS ANGELES, CA.-Regen Projects presents an exhibition of works by
New York artist Rachel Harrison. Her practice includes sculpture,
painting, collage, photography, video and installation. Harrison's work
is consistently layered, creating a multiplicity of meaning and
perspectives with which to engage the work both visually and
conceptually. Investigating space, time, and context, the works redefine
existing terms between images and forms while positing alternate
relationships to consider. Playing with color, object-hood and language,
Harrison constitutes analogies that lead to new thoughts and
investigations.
"Think of Harrison's concerted mixture of mediums – of sculpture and
painting, of sculpture and photography – not as a post-medium assertion
announcing a generalized indistinction of form, but of a propping of
one form upon another, one medium locating its possibilities for
continuance in another, in excess of the other… Think of the linked
aesthetic experiences of Harrison's sculpture, of its concerted amalgam
of abstraction and representation, of image and object. Think, finally,
of the possibilities for a sculpture that extends not just from other
mediums, like photography, but can prop itself upon entirely other
social spaces, other social systems – the commodity and shopping,
costumes and celebrity, even politics, even history." -- Baker, George,
"Mind the Gap." Parkett No. 82 (2008): 146-148
The exhibition, entitled Asdfjkl;, presents six sculptural works
composed of statuesque abstract forms painted and combined with
readymade objects. These sculptures are complex amalgamations that
resemble monuments but are completely non-referential. The title,
Asdfjkl;, describes the standard placement of one's fingers when typing.
It is mentally tactile, as it speaks to the moment when one is just
about to touch an object, or when one's fingers have just had that
physical encounter. The rapidly changing relationship to writing
produced by the aid of machines is central to this title (the artist
grew up without texting and is still not that good at it). Structural
Design is a sculpture whose components are a Royal typewriter and
painted forms balancing on the edge of the typewriter's case, teetering
in a moment between gravity and expression.
