Exhibition
Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
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From new work by international artists to sculpture drawn from world-class collections, this festival showcases the diversity of contemporary sculptural practice across four sites: the Henry Moore Institute, The Hepworth Wakefield, Leeds Art Gallery and Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
At the Henry Moore Institute, Phyllida Barlow’s assertion that “sculpture is the most anthropological of the art forms” brings together five extraordinary artists whose work looks at the relationship between material culture and an understanding of human history, present and future.
Within the trajectory and methods of anthropology lie the foundations of history and all social sciences. Objects play a pivotal role in that framework, with material culture often made to function as a form of black box recorder that can play back history, identity, belonging and difference. The exhibition at the Institute reflects upon this responsibility of objects.
Tamar Harpaz
Tamar Harpaz (b. Jerusalem) is known for sculptures that use light, mirrors and lenses. She combines them with found objects, typically from domestic environments and close to failing, into sprawling installations that at first are hard to make sense of. Yet narrative is never far away, and a movement, sound or triggered association begins to create a framework of allusion.
Harpaz initially worked in film and her installations retain an element of the cinematic. Rather than being passive and looking at a screen, the component parts of her installations are orchestrated in such a way as to pull the viewer from detail to detail, akin to an editor’s cuts in a film. This choreography brings a sculptural consideration to each of the forms she uses. She has said: ‘for me sculpture is about perceiving objects … working with their colour, materiality, shape and weight to uncover a latent history’. She is interested in the memories and meanings they potentially retain, those that emerge both from the viewer’s associations and the stories Harpaz suggests.
For this exhibition Harpaz has made a new installation that fills the gallery. The work is contained by a perimeter of electric cabling that is both symbolic and functional; it acts as a border and also a life force. Periodically, a 12 volt electric pulse unites the disparate objects before releasing them once again. Harnessing technology first used in telegraph messaging, the pulse powers electromagnets to make a circuit. Once this is completed, the objects are activated and begin to sound out a code. While this covert message remains unknown, Harpaz’s animation of the sculptural components teases a tangible, yet appropriately unstable, relationship between material culture, memory and communication.
Harpaz graduated from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, and was the recipient of the Rijksakademie Fellowship Award in 2016, and the Wolf Fund Anselm Kiefer Prize in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include those at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Edel Assanti in London (2018). Other recent shows include March Madness, Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen (2017); Kitchen Sink Dramaat, Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2014) and Girl-to-Gorilla, Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2012).
Rashid Johnson
Rashid Johnson (b. Chicago) makes work that explores art history, literature, philosophy, race and representation. He works in a variety of media including sculpture, drawing and film, using materials ranging from from tribal masks and books to houseplants and shea butter. Through his work, Johnson draws attention to the processes of identity creation, especially within contemporary black America.
For Yorkshire Sculpture International Johnson has made a new installation in which he considers the responsibilities of objects, and how materials both assign and are assigned with meaning.
Three tables each support a form made entirely from shea butter. Extracted from the African shea tree, the butter is used in cosmetics and has come to be traded in North America and Western Europe on a form of exoticism with healing properties. It is also used widely within the African diaspora. Johnson has described it as a material he is now as familiar with for making art as oil paint, harnessing both its physical and symbolic possibilities.
Three phases of sculpture are presented: on one table, a series of portrait busts alludes to the complicated power systems that often exist when a person commissions a representation of their own image. The anonymous faces also link to Johnson’s previous work, reflecting upon a rise in social injustices and of nationalism in Europe and the United States.
Another table holds a reimagining of a particular moment in the history of Western abstract art – Minimalism. The impermanence and malleability of Johnson’s material subverts the rational order of sculpture from this period.
Finally, responding to the fundamental human need to make and engage with materials, the artist has left one table with shea butter in its found state as an open proposition. Visitors are invited to use the material on this table to make your own sculptures.
Recent exhibitions by Rashid Johnson include: Rashid Johnson. It Never Entered My Mind, Hauser & Wirth, St Moritz (2019); Groundings, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2019); Rashid Johnson. No More Water, Lismore Castle Arts (2918) and Michael Jackson: On the Wall, National Portrait Gallery, London (2018).
Maria Loboda
Maria Loboda makes work that has been described as performing a kind of anthropology. Inspired by its methods, alongside an interest in linguistics and archaeology, she unearths obscure histories and objects to unravel humanity’s failed attempts to explain the universe through material culture. Through her work, Loboda subverts the historical application of meaning to objects by creating new combinations, all the while enjoying the fallibilities of history, memory and records.
Despite her concern for objects Loboda typically starts with words, first selecting a term, phrase, action or title. For Yorkshire Sculpture International she has created an installation called The Chosen. The act of choosing is one at the heart of any debate around anthropology and its methods – what is selected and by whom. Ultimately, the act of collecting, or ‘choosing’, reveals as much about the selector as the selected, and is always the result of circumstance: time, resource, personality and so on.
Six lamps, each made from alabaster, hang high on the wall in the gallery. Giving out a subtle light, their initial allure stands at odds with their arrangement and, especially, their contents. Inside each lamp, a series of preserved exotic insects from around the world is seen in silhouette. They are specimens that have each been chosen, but for why and for what remains unclear. Inspired by a 1920s design by Pierre Chareau (1883–1950), the lamps form what the artist describes as ‘a beautiful ritual vessel for the insects now entombed within them: they lend gravitas to this dysfunctional environment I’ve created’.
Loboda studied at Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule, Frankfurt. Recent exhibitions include To Build a Business that will Never Know Completion, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City (2019); Sitting Here Bored Like a Leopard, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2018) and Volcano Extravaganza 2016, Fiorucci Art Trust’s annual festival on Stromboli.
Cauleen Smith
Cauleen Smith (b. Riverside, California) is an interdisciplinary artist best known for her work in film. Reactivating archives and harnessing the possibilities of imagination, her work especially addresses issues faced by black women today.
Sojourner 2018 follows a lineage of sculpture, tracing a history of racism and resilience to offer a vision for the future. The journey started with a photograph Smith found of nine debonair black men standing in front of the Watts Towers in Los Angeles. Published in Life magazine in 1966, the image illustrated an article on the aftermath of the Rebellion Riots the previous year, following which the Towers were among very few structures that remained intact. Made by the artist Simon Rodia (1879-1965) outside his house, the Towers are a series of interconnected sculptures covered in a mosaic made from found materials. They feature in the wallpaper in this installation.
Another legacy of the Watts Rebellion was the Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum. Purifoy (1917-2004), a sculptor who lived and worked in Los Angeles at that time, began to salvage materials scarred by the riots, making assemblages from street detritus. Escaping the city, Purifoy moved to the Joshua Tree Desert in the late 1980s. He lived there for the last fifteen years of his life, creating ten acres full of large-scale sculpture on the desert floor.
Smith reimagines Purifoy’s sculpture museum as the site of a utopian feminist community. A group of women in vivacious outfits gather among Purifoy’s sculptures to restage the Life magazine photograph. Smith’s film takes its name from and pays homage to activist Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), and to the spiritual journey upon which the film’s protagonists embark.
A further sculptural presence is made in the room. Two Rebeccas is a stand-in for Rebecca Cox Jackson (1795-1871) and Rebecca Perot (1818-1901), spiritualist founders and central to the first black Shaker movement in the United States. Jackson’s journal is considered the first black queer spiritual narrative in American history.
Smith received a BA from San Francisco State University in 1991 and an MFA from the University of California in 1998. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts. Along with screenings at many international film festivals, her recent solo exhibitions include Cauleen Smith: We Already Have What We Need, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2019) and Give It Or Leave It, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2017); her work also featured in the Whitney Biennial, New York (2017).
Sean Lynch
Sean Lynch (b. County Kerry) reveals unwritten stories and forgotten histories, making work that extracts alternative readings of place, events and artefacts.
Peculiar subjects and events resurrected through Lynch’s investigations include Joseph Beuys’ visit to Ireland in 1974; uncovering illicit carvings made by Irish stone carvers, the O’Shea brothers, in Oxford; exploring socially conservative reactions to modern art in Ireland; working with the fast food outlet on the site of the first museum in the UK, and locating repurposed remnants of the infamous DeLorean Motor Company at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
Presented in the Henry Moore Institute Research Library, his project for Yorkshire Sculpture International is based on the life and work of ‘Flint Jack’ (real name Edward Simpson), a nineteenth-century Yorkshire antiquarian, vagabond and highly skilled artisan. Flint Jack sold fake megalithic axeheads and ceramic and stone carving forgeries to museums throughout the UK.
Despite their lack of historical providence and verification, these objects still populate many public museum collections. In this installation, emphasis is placed on Flint Jack not necessarily as a person, but as an active voice from the depths of history who can chart the role of the anomaly, oddity and the inauthentic in sculptural practice.
It is the first comprehensive exhibition of Flint Jack’s body of work, where objects and imbued narratives will consider the role of anomaly and the disturbance of history through material culture. The installation punctures the holdings of the Institute’s Research Library, resting within the context of its perceived authoritative history.
A publication by Lynch and artist Jorge Satorre offers further divergent views, detailing Flint Jack not simply as an individual from the past, but again as a method to grasp the encounters and juxtapositions of the contemporary world – local Yorkshire history, the development of the principles of a social art history of Leeds, a gathered catalogue of his known work and more surprising research unearthed along the way.
Lynch was educated at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Alongside representing Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2015, he has held recent solo exhibitions at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2017); Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver (2016); Rose Art Museum, Boston (2016); Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2016) and Modern Art Oxford (2014), among many others. In 2015-16 he curated group exhibitions at Flat Time House, London, and Lismore Castle Arts, Waterford, and was recently Audain Distinguished Artist-In-Residence at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. He is currently Visiting Professor of Sculpture at Carnegie Mellon School of Art, Pittsburgh.
Related exhibitions
Phyllida Barlow: Sculpture and Drawings from the Leeds Collection
8 March – 29 September 2019
Upper Sculpture Study Gallery
Working with mass produced materials and ad hoc processes, Barlow creates objects that are at once playful and strange, abstract and anthropomorphic, from hand-sized works to monumental commissions.
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