A new show has arrived at the Clifford Gallery. It’s called Sessile, and it is curated by Josh Minkus. The exhibition includes works by five sculptors: Giulia Cenci (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Rand Hardy (New York, N.Y.), Eva Löfdahl (Stockholm, Sweden), K.r.m. Mooney (San Francisco, Calif.) and Nick Raffel (Chicago, Ill.). Despite their differences in style and approach, these artists all respond to technological innovation and the precariousness born of a rapidly changing environment.
Sessile brings artists into a conversation on a global scale, exploring what is shared and what remains specific to one’s sense of place and the social systems embedded there.
The works explore the formal impulse of modernism and networked infrastructures such as plumbing pipes and TV antennas. The objects in the exhibition also address the environment, science, and issues of taxonomy. The sculptures, Minkus notes, focus on “the use and misuse of materials as they relate to networks, in terms of their everyday social and practical functions.” The plumbing pipes that Nick Raffel repurposes reimagine networked systems, Giulia Cenci’s surfaces of epoxy (better living through chemistry) hold both promises of endurance and the realities of the fallible.
K.r.m. Mooney says, “I am interested in how difference is more present than ever within human and non-human bodies: intersex fish or flowers as interspecies cyborgs.” The work offers up biological models, perhaps posing more questions than our “networked” lives offer answers.
The exhibition is a meditation on biology, interconnectivity, and uncertain boundaries. Where does the stem end and the leaf start? Like many of the exhibitions in the Clifford, this show combines biology with art and even geography. Where does the specific space (the Clifford Gallery) give way to its locale in a university in Upstate New York – and what is the relationship between the sculpture and the orientation of the viewer experiencing it?
The show runs through February 15, 2017, in the Clifford Gallery.
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