A visit to British artist Richard Hughesí exhibition on view at Anton Kern Gallery slowly reveals that all is not what it seems! Hughes, 34 years old, has established a reputation for meticulously crafted replicas of ordinary objects. He likes that the inordinate amount of time he puts into painstakingly recreating the item is invisible.
In the center of the gallery sits the fabricated foundation of a razed house. It evokes a mood of abandonment and loss. Look carefully to discover that in each room of the former home a letter appears shaped by stains and tears in the carpet and flooring. Can you see what it spells out? “The End” with the toilet hole providing the period!
The sense of neglect continues in the shoefiti, pairs of sneakers tossed over utility wires hanging from the ceiling. The dirty cast-off sneakers of Dead Flies are actually sculptures precisely constructed from cast polyurethane and stitched canvas as well as enamel and acrylic paint. Check out the defunct cast-iron Victorian lamp posts. Again, these objects are not ready-mades taken from life but “fakes” composed of fiberglass and resin and coated with iron powder. Don’t miss the sad-sack faces of the soccer balls sitting on top of these sculptures titled Malingerer.
As the illusion of decay extends to Shut Down I and Shut Down II, the doorways boarded up with rotting wood, I found myself wondering about the specificity of Hughes’ landscape. Hughes mines his childhood environment on the southern edge of Birmingham, England in the 1980s. Itís a marginalized locale without a clearly defined state of being urban, suburban, or rural. He’s described how tenements met the countryside and his ongoing interest in “living on the edges”.
Hughes often recounts his experiences with skateboarding in “no man’s land” areas and paying attention to the curbs and stairs in shopping centers and places of municipal architecture. For me, a magical moment happens while looking at Blue Heaven. At first, the sculpture appears to be hundreds of pieces of blue fun tack extending across the long west wall of the gallery. A memory of posters lining a teenager’s bedroom quickly comes to mind. In spite of its ordinariness and before I knew its title, I kept thinking the piece looks so beautiful! But how is that possible it’s just blobs of fun tack that have been left behind! Closer inspection and noting the materials on the checklist confirms my hunch: the blue fun tack is actually cast bronze and each one carries the artist’s fingerprint. This work speaks to Hughes ability to take the banal and forgotten and through his re-making of it endow the objects with an extraordinary presence.
Enter the brightly lit back gallery to see Chapel Perilous, a polygonal rose window, set into the wall. As the sun pours down from the skylight above, the exhibition takes on a decidedly more spiritual mood. Or does it? Look closely at the imagery and text on this complex twelve-part teleidoscope, a variation on the closed mirror kaleidoscope with a clear lens that turns everything pointed at it into a kaleidoscopic image. From the decals to drug references, one can imagine a section of a teen’s bedroom multiplied throughout the piece. Once again, Hughes pulls us into a strongly felt narrative that moves from the once-bright hopefulness to the reality of despair. To learn more about Hughes’ work, listen to interviews with him on the Tate Channel.
Richard Hughes
Anton Kern Gallery
532 West 20th Street
until July 3, 2010