HEAT SYNC, June 10-July 21 2022 at Postmasters Gallery in New York, NY. Reviewed by Roberta Smith in the New York Times, describing it as the Plastic Sublime ✨
What is a self, anyway? How is it constructed or accumulated? To what extent can we edit, augment, replicate, extend, or even vacate it, and what might happen if we did? *
These questions posed by Cassie Packard discussing the works of Lynn Hershman Leeson may as well be a manifesto for a branch of younger new media artists following on her path. Lawrence, like Hershman and the others, creates a transfigurative space between emotional, physical, and technological reality.
Lawrence’s works - through their peculiar combination of traditional sculpture and new technologies - are reflective of our current moment. They are both aware of history and our quickly approaching world to come, with all the intermingled dread and techno-optimism the future holds. Through her work, 3D files become tangible, life-sized entities, eerie manifestations of code and data. Her unique object sense, more concerned with the human condition than human touch, merges bodies, plants, and fruits with the digital and the digitally altered, resulting in uncanny and distorted - yet perfectly convincing - material presence.
At a time when the barriers between “virtual” and “real” spaces continue to dissolve, Lawrence’s sculptures, relying equally on digital fabrication and physical augmentation, examine and explode the accumulated self through the relationships between food, the body, and technology at an exaggerated scale. The gallery is full of work with its own take on the modern, digital self - versions of Lawrence’s own body, scanned, manipulated, and printed, emerge from the wall, future fruit spin implacably on pastel tables, and, as you enter, an enormous glass bead curtain depicting a digital carrot figure plummeting through verdant space cascades over the entry to the gallery, each bead a pixel. Even the sculptures themselves seem to be having an existential crisis - often they become one with their supporting shelves and pedestals, melding the object and the structures of its presentation. Where does the object even begin and end?
Heat Sync, titled for both an integral mechanical component of 3D-printers and the most charged phase of the reproduction cycle, Lawrence’s show troubles gender, biology, mechanical/organic reproduction, and the cybernetic future simultaneously. A series of digitally-skewed, unearthly fruits and vegetables evoke hybridity, fertility, humor, and sexuality - the viewer is never quite sure if the work is an edible, a sex toy, or even fully palpable. Often strained in their gendering, these food-mirage sculptures become a vehicle for unraveling hegemonic systems of power and money, nutrition and intimacy, technology and soul.
The work often resembles food, but is also of food - the 3D-printed objects are all fabricated with polylactic acid (PLA) filament, a vegetable derived bioplastic most commonly made from fermented corn starch. This nested interplay between the physical and digital methods, material poetics, and their intrinsic humor is the unique web of logic that Lawrence is known for - we can laugh a little as we hurtle toward a fully cybernetic, biodegradable, copy-pastable future.
*Lynn Hershman Leeson, in All Her Cyborg Glory, Gets a Retrospective
by Cassie Packard August 2, 2021 hyperallergic
Documentation above by Yael Eban and Matthew Gamber
