Rachel Harrison:
Born in New
York in 1966, she moved around a lot until she finally settled down again in
New York, where she has a studio now. She is a contemporary artist that is well
known for her sculptures and installation work. Although most of her work has
an “unpleasing” aesthetic to it, art critics embrace it for its lack of
digestibility and boldness. She makes work that is influenced by ready made art
and assemblage art. As a young woman, she was greatly inspired by artists like
Chris Burden and Adrian Piper. Her interest with performance artists that
created artwork to propel a response from their audience has influenced the
look of her sculptures, that look “ugly” to the viewer, yet draw them in. Because
she was forced to be a religious person as a little girl, as a teenager she
made it a big deal to go against religion as an adult, and be part of the
counter-culture.
Her artwork makes a commentary on
modern culture, and her work is also influenced by artists such as Bruce Nauman
and Ed Ruscha, who weren’t concerned with other people’s rules, only their own.
That helped Rachel produce pieces that were bold and not catered to specific
audiences. Her artwork is generally described as sculptures or installations
that combine abstract forms with ready made objects. Her humor is evident
through her work, in pieces such as Nose, where she has a large abnormal red
figure that sits on a cardboard plinth, with an exaggeratedly long nose
attached to it. She uses her humor to make people feel uncomfortable and also
embraces the fact that everyone reads her sculptures differently. By combining
such odd shapes with the rigidness of the manufactured objects, Harrison is
able to convey a satirical opinion of modern culture. In Glamour Wig, the
placement of objects creates an abstract interpretation of a rock star or a
famous individual, and comments on the artificiality of their image.
Harrison uses found objects and
ready-mades, such as canned goods, bicycles, stools, pictures of celebrities,
trash bags, and books to juxtapose them with these organic shapes that she
creates in order to portray people in today’s world. She works at a studio in
Brooklyn, where she is constantly thinking of ways to make comments on beauty
standards for women and commercialism. As she said herself, she wants her work
to be viewed as “a push and pull between the image and the object”. And she
wants the audience to get the complete 360-degree experience. As a little girl,
she saw student protests during the 70’s, which impacted her art practice. As
an experimental person, her artwork doesn’t want to limit the viewer to one
concept or one perspective, and it stands alone, like an odd, funky idea in the
middle of a monotone environment
