March 12 – May 23, 2015
Opening reception: Thursday, March 12, 6–8 pm
Artist Talk: 7 pm
Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce Nuggets, an exhibition of sculpture by Tom Sachs. This is the artist’s first solo presentation at Lora Reynolds Gallery.
A boombox, a Barbie doll, a cleaver—each is a product of modern industrial design that most people use without thinking about how it was made or where it came from. Even when taking a moment to consider their design and manufacture, these objects still seem rather miraculous—borne of high-tech machines and materials we know little about. Sachs’s sculptures are conspicuously handmade recreations of such products—cobbled together from wood, epoxy, ceramic, and sometimes electrical components—that often, surprisingly, function just as well as their mass-produced counterparts.
Sachs trains his army of assistants to approach art-making tasks with a rigorous messiness that has become a trademark of the Tom Sachs Studio. The goal of this practice is to show as much of the work as possible that went into producing any given object—a reversal of modernization’s trend toward products with cleaner, simpler, more-perfect edges. Part of Sachs’s Glue Gun Manifesto, written for his production assistants, reads:
18. Do a messy job first. Then take the time to repair it more thoroughly. The overall
time will be the same [as starting over] but the result will be more “fucked up” and
show the evidence of your labor.
19. We want it to be “fucked up.” That is good.
The scars and imperfections in a Sachs sculpture tell the story of how it came into being, give it a history and a personality, and remove it from the realm of miraculous conception. And they stress the importance of self-awareness and skepticism when interacting with the modern world, to help avoid falling into the trap of blind, thoughtless consumption. In the artist’s own words:
When I critique culture, I’m often complicit. I eat at McDonalds. I shop at Chanel. I
love these places as much as I hate them for wrecking our world. My girlfriend looks
gorgeous in Chanel. There’s nothing like it. Except maybe Alaïa. But the point is
it’s out there, it’s real, and it’s not going away. So the more we can be in touch
with what’s going on with ourselves and the world, the better we can avoid being
a victim of it.
Tom Sachs was born in New York in 1966. He has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Austin, Deutsche Guggenheim (Berlin), Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Connecticut), SITE Santa Fe, and Fondazione Prada (Milan). Some institutions that have his work in their collections include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), and Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst (Oslo). Sachs lives and works in New York.
RELATED EVENTS
The SXSW world premiere of Tom Sachs Presents: A Space Program will be on March 16th at 9pm at The Stateside Theatre in Austin, Texas.
Tom Sachs' work is concurrently on view at The Contemporary Austin in Boombox Retrospective: 1999-2015. The Contemporary will be hosting a variety of events related to this exhibition during SXSW; a full list can be found at the Events page of The Contemporary Austin's website.