Stepping into the Leir Atrium at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, visitors encounter a motley group of objects arranged on a wall and an adjacent platform. There are photographs, a massive cluster of handmade rope and an anthropomorphized banjo with spiky hair. Nearby are a woven basket, a Victorian vase and a yellow plastic toy telephone. Interspersed throughout are Nancy Shaver’s quirky quiltlike assemblages of fabric-wrapped wooden blocks, some mounted on the wall, others perched on metal rods and one attached to a tree stump.
“These are domestic objects that tend to be in middle- and upper-class homes,” Ms. Smith-Stewart said, “whereas the pans have no socioeconomic status — they touch everyone.” She likened the interplay of the painted pans and the collectibles to that of the chorus and the gods in Greek theater. “But here,” she said, “which is the chorus and which are the gods?”
A plaster cast of the head of the Greek goddess Iris, from the marble original at the Acropolis, graces the entrance to Ruby Sky Stiler’s “Ghost Versions.” The exhibition presents two new pieces by Ms. Stiler, wall-scale reliefs made of Hydrocal plaster. Their repetitive patterns echo the motifs in an accompanying display of classical plaster casts lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Bellarmine Museum of Art: torsos and busts, drapery, architectural fragments. Ms. Stiler’s 21st-century wall reliefs, made from castoff materials in her studio, evoke diverse artistic associations, including Henri Matisse’s cutouts, Louise Nevelson’s constructions and Native American pottery. Their juxtaposition with reproductions of ancient sculptures raises questions about the nature of authenticity and authorship, and the permeable boundary between kitsch and art.
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