Listening to Objects
Listening to Objects
Arnold J Kemp, Betye Saar, Mira Schor, Nádia Taquary
and Nicole Wermers
16 January–28 February
Maximillian William is pleased to present Listening to Objects, a group exhibition featuring Arnold J Kemp, Betye Saar, Mira Schor, Nádia Taquary and Nicole Wermers. In an age of constant distraction, sustained attention to objects and artworks is an act of radical resistance. Often using found objects or buried voices from the past, Listening to Objects invites viewers to look and listen closely, navigating the tension between legibility and materiality, mystery and revelation.
Betye Saar’s Globe Trotter (2007) addresses the history of migration, education and racial injustice. A small cage holds a vintage toy soldier, its features worn and rusted by time. The edge of the table is lined by a bamboo ruler, introducing notions of measurement and statistics, and the historical misuse of these ideas. The ruler also serves to remind the viewer of the tininess of the cage compared to the implied enormity of the globe below. Illuminated from within, the globe hints at a planet that is bright and full of promise, yet unavailable to the caged soldier.
For her Proposals, Nicole Wermers also uses found objects, including everyday consumer items, to create pedestals upon which she places a ceramic sculpture of a female figure. Highlighting the role of women as the subject of both artworks and advertisements, Wermers brings a mischievous eye to the history of statuary, altering the voices of the objects she deploys. Presented as maquette-sized ‘proposals’, Wermers celebrates the female body at rest, placed in a position that both acknowledges and transcends our throwaway culture.
Created from shells, straw, beading, repurposed wood and other found materials, the works in Nádia Taquary’s Oriki series are mask-like forms that confront the viewer like unplaceable artefacts. Embodying Afro-Brazilian traditions and practices, each of the works in her Oriki series has a ritualistic presence, at once an invitation to revel in beautiful surfaces and a challenge to how we might interpret complex artworks that emerge from hybrid cultures.
A fearless visionary for the past five decades, Mira Schor draws upon art history and feminist theory to address the role of art in an era of constant crisis. Schor’s recent works on paper feature women in enclosed spaces, alone and in conversation with an orb or circle. In Untitled (2024), a winged figure looks at a book, the pages open to a spread of one dark and one light circle. The figure contemplates the shapes as if they are comprehensible sources of information, and yet their meaning remains obscure. In his varied oeuvre, Arnold J. Kemp often researches forgotten figures and histories, creating work that invites the viewer to engage imaginatively with voices from the past. An homage to the great jazz musician and poet, Cecil Taylor / MOB (2024) conjures, with a veil of elegant greys, an elegiac space of music and contemplation. Kemp’s painting, and all the artworks in Listening to Objects, invite viewers to approach artworks with openness and curiosity, granting them the same level of attention that we offer a book, a piece of music, or a person.
-
Arnold J Kemp
Betye Saar
Mira Schor
Nádia Taquary
Nicole Wermers
Image: Betye Saar, Globe Trotter, 2007, Mixed media assemblage, 82.5 x 46.4 x 35.9 cm, 32 1/2 x 18 1/4 x 14 1/8 in. © Betye Saar. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, CA. Photo Brian Forrest.