Culture

WHERE ART AND LIFE MEET

INTERSECTIONS— MARLEY DAWSON: GHOSTS

The Phillip’s Collection May 20 – September 5, 2021

For his Intersections project, Australian artist Marley Dawson has created a site-specific project in two parts that respond to the Phillips’s collection and architecture. Entitled ghosts, the project reimagines the history of the museum in the present.

Inspired by the dramatic architecture of the Phillips’s Goh Annex stairway, Dawson produces two groups of kinetic sculptures that accentuate its spiral configuration. In the first group—comprised of five chairs made in brass and suspended from the dome at different heights and rotating at different axis points—the artist creates a dialogue with both the stairway railing and the Phillips’s early Modernist-Arts-and-Crafts-style chairs. While the shape and size of Dawson’s chairs mirrors the Phillips chairs, the brass he uses is the same as the brass used for the railing. Whereas the museum’s chairs are heavy and sturdy, Dawson’s are weightless and almost translucent; they function like ethereal ghosts of actual objects. Dawson’s other piece—a wall mounted sculpture consisting of hundreds of brass rods hung on a machined brass track and assembled to allow movement—converses with Morris Louis’s painting Number 182. The sculpture is scaled to two thirds, which is precisely Dawson’s height, and the rods are arranged in various patterns to achieve the striped finish of the original painting. A small motor attached to the work oscillates the rods to give them a sway and hum that echo the shimmering radiance of Louis’s painting. Much like with his hanging chairs, Dawson reverses immaterial with material, shifting the liquidy stripes of Louis’s painting into a solid sculptural mass.

The Embassy of Australia and HEMPHILL Artworks in Washington, DC, are featuring concurrent presentations of the artist’s most recent body of work.