Rachel Harrison: Sitting in a Room

Description

Sitting in a Room highlights the recent work of New York–based artist Rachel Harrison (born 1966), who takes a porous, hybrid approach to objects both made and found. Spanning mediums that include sculpture, drawing, photography and painting, Harrison’s nimble, layered method has always escaped easy categorization. Abstraction is shot through with vernacular references to jarring, often comic effect, as formalist concerns are forced to vie with rogue elements from the outside world.

“In this volume, different layers of observation (first the artist, then essayists, then the reader) start folding in on each other. The order in this sequence is clear, of course, but not unlike Harrison’s drawings, ultimately it might coalesce into a new, vivid whole that is, in a way, in a state of perpetual flux. In Harrison’s work, cultural tokens, the history of art, and space itself come in for new scrutiny while leveling hierarchies through a democratizing process of sifting and accumulation. This sweeps up items from the ‘museum world’ but also the ‘real world’—distinctions that are easy to make but that never quite hold. Hierarchy, democracy: these things have meaning in many areas of life today, of course, each one plagued by its discontents or vulnerabilities. In Duane Hanson’s sculpture, which Harrison draws into her orbit here, one magazine lies on the floor with the title CULTURE AND LIFE. How should we think about the two? Spending time with Harrison’s work, room by room, begins to suggest one way, though one still has to untangle it all for oneself, whether at the Astrup Fearnley Museet or perhaps at home, with this book in your lap, sitting in a room.”
— Solveig Øvstebø, from her introduction

Texts: Negar Azimi, Anne Dressen, Lars Bang Larsen, Solveig Øvstebø
Editors: Rachel Harrison, Solveig Øvstebø
Design: Joseph Logan
Published by Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, and Gregory R. Miller & Co, New York, 2023
Hardcover, 231 pages
Dimensions: 31 x 23 x 2 cm – 1,5 Kg
ISBN 978-82-93654-20-9