Exhibit review: Rebecca Casement - "Reclamations"
Photo credit: All SHE Makes
We had the privilege to visit our first exhibit in person, at MSU Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. To say that this immersive installation evoked emotions is an understatement. Reclamations is the kind of show that in a split second makes you question your reality without you even noticing.
Photo credit: All SHE Makes
The powerful, distorted in their form, plaster shapes were scattered yet carefully cuddled around the room, including mid air suspension. Metal shapes held by a yarn made you wonder if they were going to snap out of place any second now. The audio recording of variously paced breathing patterns set viewer’s psyche into panic on a strange primal level. Every detail of the set up contradicted any previous expectations about the objects. What an interesting challenge to notice and observe the reaction that has been. This installation allows the viewer to experience the emotions society often views as strange or undesirable. Is one able to sit with the unsettling ? Or will they be unable to resist the urge to escape?
Via MSU Broad: Rebecca Casement transforms the gallery into a largescale installation, a space as psychologically oriented as it is physically imposing. Visitors are encouraged to navigate the environment according to their own path, and thus participate in an intimate experience with the work. Casement’s practice is perhaps best described as a form of affective labor; her works “move” visitors in many ways, but most importantly they tap into an emotional realm. The artist’s use of materials is particularly evocative. Among the bandaged sculptures and the pointed teeth of floating bandsaws, there is a sense of lingering sorrow and a burdensome weight. The artist questions, “What is our relationship to these emotions that are often suppressed, and how do we own them individually and culturally?”
Photo credit: All SHE Makes
Rebecca discusses the installation: Reclamations explores the complexity and fragility present in trauma along with the subsequent silence and isolation. It expresses what happens after that initial moment of impact, when individuals are left alone with their pain, and what our roles are individually and as a society. Humanity is about more than just being human, to be humane is to act with a level of compassion towards each other.
Central to Reclamations are five groupings of 3-7 individually hanging anthropomorphic structures ranging in size from 16” to 72” in the round. Each form is made utilizing a process of layering chicken wire, plaster gauze, and papier-mâché paste. These are materials that, alone, are unable to support themselves, but when layered can support the whole. The layers are intentionally left visible to heighten a sense of their vulnerability and each form’s gesture captures a body in pain. Each structure is suspended to create a sense of immobilization and to capture a moment in time. The surface of the forms is left raw to allow their materiality to be their focus. I am posing the question, “what do we do when we recognize these gestures in others and in ourselves.”
In opposite corners of the gallery, spherical vessels appear singularly or in stacks. Together, the vessels invoke questions on importance and expendability, strength and fragility, inclusion and isolation. Recordings of shuttered breathing emanate from speakers placed throughout the installation. They fill the vast exhibition space with a sense of disquiet and anxiety. I took the intimate act of breathing and separate it from the person. I use breath as a symbol for all living humans, just like the highly abstract physical forms that surround the participants. In doing so, I approach the universality of trauma and our role in it.
Photo credit: All SHE Makes
