Lecture

Vera List Center for Art and Politics and SculptureCenter are pleased to present Subjective Histories of Sculpture this year with Lucy Skaer, Nairy Baghramian, and Josephine Meckseper. The artists have been invited to cite specific works, bodies of work, texts, or even personal anecdotes taken from inside and outside cultural production, and inside and outside “art,” to develop their own subjective, incomplete, partial, or otherwise eclectic histories, question assumptions, and propose alternative methods for understanding sculpture’s evolving strategies.

Josephine Meckseper examines a pertinent dimension of our material world, representing practices that foreground art objects as commodities. She explores not only connections with the art market, but also how objects can escape meaning, status, and fixed purpose with changing contexts and configurations. Through carefully arranged installations, photographs, and videos, Meckseper exposes the relationship between politics and the consumer worlds of advertising and fashion. She presents various hybridized forms of display that comment on the homogenous culture that capitalism has created. Meckseper looks for new ways to subvert normative mass culture in order to re-contextualize images and signs that have become inflated from over-proliferation. Positioning objects such as a toilet plunger, a stuffed white rabbit, and perfume bottles, the artists work reveals the absurdity of materialisms manifestations.

Born in 1964 in Lilienthal, Germany, Meckseper currently lives and works in New York. Mecksepers work was included in recent international group exhibitions at the Saatchi Gallery, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Galerie des Galeries, Paris; and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto. She was also included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and has had recent solo exhibitions at Elizabeth Dee gallery, New York.

Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”