Robota
March 25–July 24, 2022
The Explanatory Void
March 25–July 24, 2022
March 25–June 5, 2022
The List Center is pleased to present three new solo exhibitions with Matthew Angelo Harrison, Raymond Boisjoly, and Sharona Franklin.
Matthew Angelo Harrison: Robota
March 25—July 24, 2022
In his sculptures and installations, Detroit-based artist Matthew Angelo Harrison traces intersections of labor, technology, and cultural heritage. Harrison’s experience working as a clay modeler at Ford Motor Company established a fundamental framework that has endured in his interest in the prototype—a design stage the artist describes as “an in-between state as both a reality and a possibility,” and a concept that remains central to his artistic practice.
The artist’s List Center exhibition includes work from his Dark Silhouette series (2017–ongoing), which originally featured animal skeletal remains and wood sculptures from West Africa encased in solid resin blocks. Carving into these resin sculptures using precise, high-speed, computer-controlled cutting tools (CNC routers and mills that he designs and builds himself), Harrison riffs on the auto industry’s manufacturing technology. In a recent shift, Harrison’s encapsulations also feature material traces of the automotive industry and its labor organizing—car parts such as headlights, protective gear of factory workers, and signs from United Auto Workers’ union strikes. Incorporating these items under the exhibition title Robota, Harrison attends to the devaluation of human labor amid the technological promise of robotics and furthers his exploration of the materiality of Blackness, labor, and technology.
Matthew Angelo Harrison: Robota is organized by Natalie Bell, Curator.
Harrison’s exhibition is complemented by the artist’s first monograph, edited by Natalie Bell and Elena Filipovic, designed by Practise, and published by MIT Press, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Kunsthalle Basel. Contributors include Taylor Renee Aldridge, Bell, Jessica Bell Brown, DeForrest Brown Jr., and Filipovic. It is available for purchase here.
Raymond Boisjoly: The Explanatory Void
March 25—July 24, 2022
Raymond Boisjoly works with text, photography, and images to contemplate modes of transmission and consider how language, culture, and ideas can be mediated, framed, or received. A Vancouver-based artist of Haida and Quebecois descent, Boisjoly expands on the Vancouver School’s Post-Conceptual photographic practices while attending to complex negotiations of Indigeneity in the context of colonialism. Interested in the ways that both images and language can break, distort, falter, or fail, Boisjoly draws on, and bends, vernacular conventions in language, photography, and fabrication. His works often interrogate their own place in the realm of fine art through the use of printing mediums such as nylon tarp, sign-maker’s vinyl, office paper, or beer cans, and they openly draw from popular culture or academic texts as raw material.
For his first solo museum presentation in the United States, Boisjoly will present new works suggestive of 3-D imaging alongside recent related pieces that provoke an ambiguity and tension between text and image. In a large-scale mural executed on site, the artist will abrade a beer can on the wall to render wavy, distorted text with a graphite-like quality. In this work, Boisjoly refers to complex histories of ritual, and tenders the possibility that a beer can may a tool for production rather than consumption. The exhibition’s title, The Explanatory Void, alludes to spectral presences like shadows and echoes as well as the sometimes-gaping gulf between language and experience.
Raymond Boisjoly: The Explanatory Void is organized by Natalie Bell, Curator.
List Projects 24: Sharona Franklin
March 25—June 5, 2022
Artist and disability-justice advocate Sharona Franklin reinterprets vernacular and domestic craft techniques to make psychedelic, hallucinatory works in textile, ceramic, and gelatin that reference biomedicine and ecology. With a distinct material sensibility that reveals tensions between the intimacy of the handmade and the alienation of industrial-scale production, her works raise pointed questions about access, care, and disease and disability.
For her first institutional solo exhibition, Franklin debuts an installation of sculptures looking at medical waste, so-called “Big Pharma,” and the products and byproducts of bioscientific research. Connecting her extensive research into environmental harm and bioethics with more holistic propositions for remediation, Franklin approaches these themes from a variety of perspectives, including her personal relationship to medical waste and healthcare economies formed through lifelong interactions with the medical system. In this new body of work, the artist unfolds the complexities and contradictions of our dependence on biomedical products and the uneven distribution of their benefits and harm.
List Projects 24: Sharona Franklin is organized by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator.
Related programming:
Artist talk: Raymond Boisjoly
Saturday, March 26, 2pm EST (in-person)
Curator tour: Selby Nimrod on Sharona Franklin
Wednesday, April 27, 12:15pm EST (in-person)
Please visit our website for the most up-to-date information about upcoming programs and visiting the galleries.
