Alyssa McClenaghan: When Mirrors Turn into Windows

About

The exhibition features her most recent sculpture series and draws on the artist's relationship to historic windows from her real estate upbringing in an East Coast, Gilded Age city. Each sculpture transforms, recreates, and reimagines everyday windows to reflect the human body and its psyche. 

The works begin with foam insulation boards that are built into cube-like forms. Once assembled, they are then carved into each unique shape. After multiple layers of plaster are applied and sanded down, the objects are painted in matte acrylic house paints. The use of construction materials is strategically at odds with the femininity and warmth found in the works, in order to explore the relationship between materials, gender, and the history of women in domestic spaces.

Windows are passages, allowing air and light into a space, which both serves to protect and comfort the inhabitants of a home. The new works highlight window weights, which were typically cast iron weights, suspended from ropes, hidden in the window pockets behind the face trim, which allowed the heaviness of a wooden and glass window to glide more easily in their frame. These window weights take on phallic forms attached to ropes that are exposed, not hidden, and interact directly with the window like structures. Instead of their typical function of creating balance and ease of use, they are entwined and suspended, supporting or pulling the window forms, and bringing to light the many invisible roles women historically have played in the household.

Seen together, the works begin to escape from the autonomy of a single body's experience and dig deeper into relationships and the fluidity or impermanence of balance, or lack thereof, between two parties.