A series of exaggerated, color pencil drawings depicts the singer alongside Picasso’s Gertrude Stein and other figures from art history. The Amy Winehouse room, is similarly playful and confounding. It is difficult to keep a straight face before the actor’s steely, elevated visage, particularly in the hallowed Whitney. Take the outlandish monument Huffy Howler (2004): a picture of Mel Gibson suspended on a sheepskin by binder clips, mounted on a metal pole and affixed to a bicycle atop a purple, uneven concrete pedestal. In fact, she has this incredible knack to make it funny and appealing and relatable too.” “But that could be overwhelming and confusing and make people turn away. There’s lots of stuff going on all the time,” says Whitney curator Elisabeth Sussman. “There is so much visual pleasure and excitement,” says art historian David Joselit, who co-organized “ Rachel Harrison Life Hack.” Indeed, her constellation of groceries (canned goods, a recurring motif through her decades of practice), household junk (garbage pail, wireless headphones, silver tinsel wig), video, photography and blob-like cement forms ranging from several inches in earlier work to massive, lopsided clumps today are, by design, flamboyant and absurd. With a distinct DIY-looking pastiche aesthetic and a formal rigor, you know a Rachel Harrison when you see one. Famous for humorous, electric-colored mashups that draw deeply on pop culture, Harrison creates a complex language that’s singularly her own. Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.įew artists are as irreverent as Rachel Harrison, whose first full-scale, mid-career survey-“Rachel Harrison Life Hack”-opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art this week. Untitled (Poles for a Dangerous Art World), 1992.
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