Radical Plastic

About

 Radical Plastic is an opportunity to mediate on the idea of in-between-ness, and what it means to be in the middle of something as each artist proves adept at navigating fluid and liminal areas.

Becca Albee’s work navigates between prescriptions of color as relating to the body, gender, and space, and looking at color theory as a lens to confuse those constructs. On view is Albee’s Radical Feminist Therapy series, which looks at Bonnie Burstow's Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence (published in 1992) as point of departure.

Carolyn Carr’s A Photographer’s Studio and the Problems of Posing, takes its title from a William Mortensen book and utilizes a store-bought drop cloth painted with red clay sourced from the Antebellum Trail as conceptual and literal backdrop for her photography studio room installation.

Catherine Czacki’s sculptural work, BB, is an anti-bed bug mattress cover re-imagined as a slumping, hanging sculpture—prompting connotations to porousness, desire, possession, the still life and the establishing of physical boundaries between self and other.

Rachel Debuque creates large scale, candy colored sets that both challenge and reflect pop cultural tedium. Within her sets, constructed objects act as molded simulacra, which offer an opportunity to give them new meaning. Glisten, a new work commissioned by CUE, is a performance installation that features a muscular, female athlete in an “exercise room,” who is performing a workout regime.

Carson Fisk-Vittori constructs environments integrating images, artifacts and flora to analyze the complex interactions between humans, the dynamic landscape and its ecosystems. Her current body of work, Disturbance Ecology, brings together an ecosystem of hypothetical weather machines, landscaping scenarios, and animal repellants.

Mia Goyette's work explores a potential future by creating a “hybrid landscape” from the detritus of human consumption. Wall-mounted sculptures dramatize and exaggerate waste streams created by simple domestic systems such as decorative window box flowers and their contained water run-off trays.

Michelle Grabner is driven by a consistent negotiation with the forms that qualify "domesticity" through her "home base." On view are a selection of her gingham inkjet prints, works that reinforce her long-form practice of copying and translating gingham patterns uniting the body (hand) with the mind (commentary) in an almost coach-and-player like fashion.

Ria Roberts is a graphic designer and organizer. Occupying the store-front like gallery of the CUE space, Roberts presents a bookshelf titled Design Within Reach, made from discarded materials from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where she is employed) and featuring newly released issues of Oikos and Methods alongside Bittersweet, a commissioned natural scent by Tatiana Godoy Betancur, jewelry by Sarah Shikama, swimwear by Mia Lindquist, and ceramics by Lauren Francescone.

Carolyn Salas' abstract sculptures are no doubt formal, but also suggestively human-scaled. Salas considers the physical installation of her works carefully, so they almost imply and build anthropomorphic conversations. Her most recent body of work utilizes the mold-making and casting process to create a sculptural installation on a large platform.