An insect trapped in amber is a remarkable relic as it shows us through the fossilized resin, an ancient creature from millions of years ago. Matthew Angelo Harrison’s transparent resin blocks may be made in our times, but, in the same way, they encase peculiar relics.
In his solo exhibition at the MIT Visual Arts Center in Boston (till 24th July), entitled "Robota", Harrison presents a series of resin blocks encasing wooden African effigies, ceremonial masks, spears and a 5m high totem.
In some cases, the artist bought the pieces, made by unknown makers of the Bambara, Dogon, Makonde and Senufo peoples, from European market dealers selling on the Internet. But, in other cases, it is not possible to be sure about their authenticity and asses the region where they came from. They may indeed be just replicas made in Africa for tourists or maybe in the US for African American customers.
These frozen artefacts that therefore pose the question of authorship and copyright, also hint at the desire of people from diasporic communities to find a connection with their origins. Often they may end up looking for it in museums where items (that in some cases were stolen...) are displayed in vitrines that establish a new distance between the object and the visitors, replicating the trauma of separation.
These sculptures hinting at cultural trafficking are juxtaposed to resin blocks trapping other relics - workers' protective gear such as gloves and helmets and labor union paraphernalia like placards from the last major US United Auto Workers (UAW) strikes of the 1990s, objects associated with blue-collar labor. These "Black relics" were collected by the artist's own mother who worked on the General Motors production line and by her union colleagues.
By engaging the different pieces in a dialogue, the Detroit-born artist combines the ancestral and the personal, the historical and the political, traditional and modern rituals.
Harrison makes indeed a comparison between the digital trade routes that the African objects traveled as contemporary versions of the routes that carried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean.
Like a dragonfly in amber or like time capsules, as the artist explains, these objects, from the wooden sculptures to the gloves used by workers in the car industry, are given a new interpretation, hinting at colonialism, racism and slavery, but also at low-wage, precarious labor, a new form of enslavement.
This is a subject close to his heart as Harrison's family members worked in Detroit's automotive plants, and the artist himself worked in the prototyping division at a Ford auto manufacturing plant.
There's naturally also technology here: in his practice Harrison uses hand-built, low-resolution 3D printers and a CNC router (computer-controlled milling machine). The artist often employs the printers to recreate ceramic clay versions of the artefacts he incorporated in his resin blocks, adding programming glitches and errors or eliminating colours, to come up with different versions of the original sculptures and represent a loss of information at the same time.
Used in Detroit's car-manufacturing plants, the CNC router helps the artist creating surfaces and cavities, cuts and deformations, grids of raised cylindrical elements and holes. The incisions form reflections or give the impression that the object trapped inside the resin block is trying to break free.
One of the best examples of sculptures in which Harrison used the CNC router is "Headdress": the latter integrates in a resin block a worker's protective helmet covered in Union stickers. On the block the artist carved a face (taken from a scanned staff from the Penn Museum in Philadelphia) that forms a spectral image three-dimensionally superimposed on the helmet, again a reference to slavery and blue-collar labor.
Imperialism combines therefore with factory labor struggles in Harrison's work, forming a continuous loop. This body of work offers a social and cultural commentary about the African heritage and Detroit assembly lines, but it is also a way to remind us that technologies from the manufacturing industries can be applied to art practices with very intriguing results.
Comments