1981-82
Indianapolis Art Center
Indianapolis, Indiana, 1982
Indiana University Art Museum
Bloomington, Indiana 1982.
New Art Examiner Artist Pages, 1983
Rooted in the conceptual operations of the 1970’s these early, prototypic artistic investigations probe the relationships between the scientific, historical, and allegorical readings of form, material, and site. This direction began in 1981 with the first Metaobjects, entitled at the time One-Ten, a rematerialization strategy after conceptualism. More artifactual than sculptural, and referring to both industrial society and earlier eras of civilization, the Metaobjects collapse the mystical and the empirical. These anachronistic works are based in a literal use of materials, emphasizing the opacity of the medium and the explicit use of process.
Influenced by Craig Owens’ The Allegorical Impulse (1980), these early post-modern works anticipate the critical examination of the hierarchies in Western material culture and conventions of display typified by the discourse of the wundercabinet and the proto-museum. Instrumental and apparatus-like, the Metaobjects eschew both the pedestal and the wall, and evolve to also challenge the nature/culture divide. The institutional critique implicit in these works is made manifest in the post-enlightenment themes of Whitehead’s botanical works begun in the 1990’s, and in her expanded artistic practices of the 2000’s, continuing to the present.
The first series of Metaobjects serves as prototypic vocabulary and method for the three Metaobject series that followed. Based in diagrammatic form and the relationship between drawn or written language and the object that they describe, the parts of this serial work are three -dimensional extrapolations from an arrow. Implying both actual and symbolic use; they appear ready for utilization even though their purpose is obscure.
More explicitly anachronistic, the larger Metaobjects II are drawn from both archaic texts and the industrial process still evident in early post- industrial Chicago. Still evolving from systems of drawing, these works form constellations and pairs, rejecting the singular corporal nature of static sculptural objects, concretizing the schematics upon which they are based. They exemplify the exploration of material allegory in all Metaobjects.
Unlike prior series, Metaobjects III were conceived as a suite of work for a specific space and their distribution in space is used to emphasize their glyphic and instrumental aspects. Now monumental in scale, the methods and materials of the work shifted, from those drawn exclusively from the industrial world and the chemical properties and references of metals, to an interest in biologically generated materials such as natural plastics like shellac, an insect product.
These shellac-based works develop and focus the experimental material language and techniques first explored in Meta-Objects III. These shellac and steel works address the relationship of nature and culture overtly, and directly reflect the post-industrial conditions now manifest in Chicago.
