RACHEL HARRISON

Since the early 1990s, Brooklyn-based artist Rachel Harrison has developed a visual language at once citational and abstract, built up of three-dimensional shapes that tempt recognition but exist, in the artist’s words, as “forms that can’t be described.” Across sculpture, photography, video, and drawing, Harrison deploys strategies resonant with, yet independent of, art movements including Neo-Dada, Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. Her wry use of celebrity imagery and commercial objects suggests what Johanna Burton terms “inappropriation”: “not really _taking _a thing so much as acknowledging its multifaceted nature in a world that will shape it and reshape it.” Often, Harrison effects the reshaping herself, lodging familiar images within roguish assemblages of artistic and para-artistic matter, from rope and household tools to polystyrene and cement, the latter materials often painted in vivid colors to forge her distinctive sculptural style. Toying with signs, surfaces, and modes of display, her objects can serve as framing devices—to repurpose Harrison’s term for a recent body of work—inviting both semiotic and phenomenological readings without submitting to either mode of interpretation. Circumambulating a Harrison provokes continual cross-referencing and new revelations, with respect not just to the work at hand but to the particular space and viewer it activates.