OBJECTS: USA 2024
x R & Company
64 White Street, New York, NY
Curated by Kellie Riggs and Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy
September 6, 2024 to January 10, 2025
https://objectsusa.r-and-company.com/
Humans are uniquely devoted to the creation, reproduction, and reinvention of objects. We depend on them to fulfill our needs and desires. We want to possess and collect them. We care about what they look like and what they are made of. And most of all, we are invested in the motivation behind their creation and the personal, cultural, and political meanings imbued within them. These fundamental truths form the conceptual framework of Objects: USA 2024, a daring entry into the chronicles of objects made in the United States within the ever-blurring disciplines of art, craft, and design.
While it is impossible to capture the entire production of objects in this country with a finite number of examples, this exhibition surveys the practices of fifty-five artists, designers, and studios based in the USA. All redefine our perceptions of objecthood while tensioning subversion and affirmation, rearranging expectations of their chosen materials and formats, and questioning what it is an object gets to be.
Building on the legacy of the Objects: USA exhibitions (1969 and 2020) but with a twist, the participants of Objects: USA 2024 inhabit a spectrum of generative and fluid categories rather than more conventional medium or format-based sections, sequenced in the gallery as Truthsayers, Betatesters, Doomsdayers, Insiders, Mediators, Codebreakers, and Keepers; though any group could lead this circular spectrum. These archetypes are purposely active to provide invigorating routes to the intentions and concerns at the core of each maker’s practice.
Conscious of cultural and political contexts of creation, the artists and designers here craft objects as markers of identity, byproducts of environmental tension, beacons of tradition, odes to materiality and process, symbols of protest, containers of feeling, future relics, and so much more. These models of objecthood distill prominent approaches to contemporary making, revealing an infinite feedback loop of the psyche of our current moment and the hands that cannot remain idle.
Artist and designers: Nik Gelormino, Mary Lee Hu, Steven KP, Joyce J. Scott, Liam Lee, Georgina Treviño, Joyce Lin, Jolie Ngo, Vincent Pocsik, Layla Klinger, Mallory Weston, Brian Oakes, Myra Mimlitsch-Gray, Ryan Decker, Chen Chen & Kai Williams, MJ Tyson, Katie Stout, Nicki Green, Anne Libby, Dee Clements, Anina Major, Sulo Bee, Roberto Lugo, Pauline Shaw, Norman Teague, Carl D'Alvia, Linda Lopez, Trey Jones, Luam Melake, Misha Kahn, Collin Leitch, Jamie Bennet, Minjae Kim, Adam Grinovich, Ferne Jacobs, Matthew Szösz, Cammie Staros, Jordan Nassar, Nicole McLaughlin, Roxanne Jackson, Lilah Rose, Francesca Dimattio, Ian Collings, Jason McDonald, Coulter Fussell, Kim Mupangilaï, Wally Dion, Richard Chavez, Amia Yokoyama, Justin Favela, James Johnson, Venancio Aragon, Cedric Mitchell, Hugh Hayden, and Lonnie Vigil.
Photos by Logan Jackson