ART CITIES:N.York-Rita McBride
Rita McBride works with the language of sculpture, employing the vocabularies of architecture and design. Her cross-disciplinary practice also encompasses collaborative publications, editions, performances and large-scale works in public space. She is fondly critical of modernist architecture and the utopian project of modernism.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Dia Art Foundation Archive
This new commission by Rita McBride, titled “Particulates” (2017), is inspired by time travel, the principles of light and space, and quantum physics. The materials of McBride’s work include water molecules, surfactant compounds, and the beams of high-intensity lasers. Her use of light as a sculptural medium marks a departure for the artist who has explored the tension between architectural and sculptural form in her extensive oeuvre since the mid-1980s. “Particulates” exchanges gravity, a core element in sculpture, for the potential of infinitely traversable space. It unfolds a wrinkle in time. Educated in the United States but based in Germany, Rita McBride is a professor at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her work explores the production of public space and the reception of culture through sculptures that recreate familiar elements from our immediate environment. McBride sometimes dramatizes objects related to architecture and design, often through the use of unusual materials and unexpected dimensions. As such, she examines acquired notions of form, function, and material in relation to a vocabulary that challenges the myths of progress induced by modern ideology. In her pieces, industrialization, mass production processes, and the laws of efficiency are brought up against the role of handmade artifacts and the sphere of the dysfunctional. McBride thus pushes the boundaries and the qualities of the white cube, a spatial modality that is often considered indispensable for the neutrality required to exhibit artworks. Once they have been inserted into these apparently passive environments, McBride’s works question the allocation of functions that define and differentiate the museum, domestic space and the urban sphere.
Info: Dia:Chelsea, 541 West 22nd Street, New York, Duration: 17/10/17- , Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 9:30-17:00, https://www.diaart.org