Rachel Harrison
1966–

Referencing the French social anthropologist’s name in its title, Claude Levi-Strauss situates a taxidermic rooster and hen atop a pair of sculpted and brightly painted pedestal-like forms. Facing off, the animals simultaneously invoke Lévi-Strauss’s concept of binary opposition (the raw and the cooked), a passage or formal entryway, and an unbroken gaze or standoff across a divide. The notion of sending and receiving is further expressed, as each sculptural form rests on a cardboard box—one a USPS Priority Mail and the other a Sharp fax machine. At once flat-footed and esoteric, the work demonstrates the potential for figurative sculpture or statuary to employ language, found objects, abstract forms, and precise choreography to renew its communicative potential.

In a series of colored-pencil drawings featuring the singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse, then recently deceased, Harrison graphically juxtaposed her image with renderings of female figures or self-portraits by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, and Martin Kippenberger. The series reminds us that identity and personification as a creative act occur across the widest spectrum of art history and popular culture.

Harrison’s Voyage of the Beagle, Two similarly pairs art-historical statuary with vernacular representations such as mannequins, a Barbie doll, figurative roadside attractions, and stuffed animals. The work references Charles Darwin’s 1839 travel memoir, which recounted his five years of exploration in the southern hemisphere aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, an expedition that resulted in the English 166 naturalist’s theory of evolution. Just as Darwin’s observations led him to conclude that all species are descended from common ancestors, Harrison’s collected photographs suggest a taxonomic study of anthropomorphic representation and its development over time and across cultures.

Beginning with the simple question “What does a sculpture look like?” Harrison carried an off-the-shelf digital camera with her for a year, documenting found objects and working within the technical limits of point-and–shoot photography. She then made a selection of fifty-eight images that are exhibited together in six subsets. “The order was very specific,” she explained. “I was interested in the linear aspect of a photo frieze, in which narrative is implied, but also in the fact that you can’t see them all at once. That’s where memory comes in, from image to image sequentially, but also across the work as a whole.”