Ai Weiwei
Catherine Wagner
Pae White
Marco Castillo
Meghann Riepenhoff
Tammam Azzam
Material Witness is a group exhibition exploring how artistic materials bear witness to and record events and processes, ranging from seismic cultural shifts to natural phenomena. By bringing together divergent artistic approaches, Material Witness amplifies the ways in which an artist's chosen medium offers up important evidence about the challenges and opportunities that define our present moment.
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CATHERINE WAGNER -
Photographs from Catherine Wagner's series In Situ: Traces of Morandi are the result of the artist's multi-year exploration of Giorgio Morandi's well-known still lifes. Wagner's images capture the silhouettes of those objects Morandi so carefully arranged and interpreted, cast against monochromatic backgrounds, which she creates through the use of colored gels.
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"In photographing an inherently immaterial, intangible interaction with light, I composed vaporous images. The solid objects appear elusive, caught in the vibratory aura at the edge of a shadow."
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AI WEIWEI -
Forever Duo (Stainless Steel Bicycles in Gilding) multiplies the popular Forever brand of bicycles in a complex allusion to freedom, social mobility, mass production, and China's changing socio-economic landscape. By utilizing an object that symbolizes both physical and social movement — while removing components essential to its function — Ai Weiwei memorializes an aspect of China's past, while alluding to the human cost in its age of rapid industrialization and economic development.
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Ai Weiwei
Lantern, 2014
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Typical of his sculptural works, Ai Weiwei's Lantern engages with recognizable Chinese forms and its history of craftsmanship. Here, the familiar red paper lantern, traditionally associated with festivals, is exquisitely carved from marble mined from a former Imperial quarry near Beijing. The resulting work speaks to the recurring themes in Ai's practice: tradition and commodification, government censorship, and freedom of speech.
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"When you constrain freedom, freedom will take flight and land on a windowsill."
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PAE WHITE -
Pae White’s clay reliefs reflect the artist’s ability to find wonder in humble and everyday materials. Deeply tactile and intricately patterned, each work reveals the inherent qualities of the material and the labor behind its making. The surface patterning of these reliefs — seemingly floral in some places, mechanical in others — are in fact thousands of individual hand-made markings, made by taking impressions of trinkets collected from flea markets and dollar stores.
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"My hope is to coax the magic out of this also humble material — and to see if it may have a dream of being transformed into something that it is not — something reflective and deep and dimensional — and magical."
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MARCO CASTILLO -
Sculptures from Marco Castillo's first body of work as a solo artist address the complex political and artistic history of post-Revolutional Cuba. Reflecting this period of utopian aesthetics, each work merges elements of Modernist and Soviet-era design with the country's traditional materials and techniques: mahogany wood and rattan caning and latticework.
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Marco Castillo
Low Relief with 15 circles and 11 organic depressions, 2020
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From the deceptively simple construction of Low Relief with 15 circles and 11 organic depressions - stacks of cardboard, carved with circles and curvilinear designs - a complex and Escher-esque labyrinth of conical forms emerges.
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“These works were inspired by this utopian movement of designers and architects trained in the Modern Movement of the 1950s. In the early years of the Revolution, this movement developed a project that could be considered an aesthetic revolution.”
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MEGHANN RIEPENHOFF -
Meghann Riepenhoff creates her camera-less cyanotypes in collaboration with the landscape and the ocean, at the edges of both. The artist coats paper with homemade cyanotype emulsion, and drapes them along the shore. As they make direct contact with the photographic materials, rain, waves, wind, and sediment leave physical inscriptions on paper, creating complex, azure surfaces.
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"The prints are really a fingerprint of place and the moment, and so different water quality, different human interventions in the water all impact the way that the print records. There is a saying that you never step in the same place twice. The thing that excites me about working in this way is that you can't repeat a moment."
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TAMMAM AZZAM -
Tammam Azzam
Untitled, 2019
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Syrian artist Tammam Azzam creates impressionistic protraits of his hometown of Damascus from fragments. Combining paint with scraps of shredded paper and newsprint, the artist presents startling imagery of a homeland devastated by years of conflict: collapsed buildings and broken surfaces of ancient, once-bustling cities. This act of reconstruction is also an act of reclaimation - and a sign of hope.
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"Things break apart: all the memories, all the details, and all of life. In my work, I'm bringing things together to rebuild the full image."
