Artist Lecture: Libby Rothfeld
Thursday, September 19 , 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm CDT
Exhibiting artist Libby Rothfeld will give a lecture about her artmaking practice, in connection to her current exhibition Selects: Libby Rothfeld, 2016-2024.
Since the mid-2010s, Libby Rothfeld has been exhibiting her sculptures, photographs, and installations in galleries and artist spaces across the United States and Europe. Selects, her institutional debut, presents work she has made over the past nine years in a variety of mediums: ceramic, photography, drawing, painting, assemblage, and various combinations of these. Demonstrating the heterogeneity of Rothfeld’s approach to making art, the exhibition contains a sprawl of styles and formats, from combinations of found objects to a slideshow of pictures of birds. What connects these nine very different artworks is the way that each one serves as a reminder of the humor and complexity buried within even the blandest, most familiar-seeming things.
Each work in Selects is a collection of quotidian items and images that has been precisely arranged and presented in a befuddling configuration. Some of Rothfeld’s materials are found and unchanged; others are completely fabricated or slightly altered. Felix’s Community (#5), for instance, is a short plinth with a giant numeral projecting up from its base; the wood-framed structure is covered with tile and laminate, and slots all over it contain a bizarre assortment of trash bags, a notepad, plastic bottles, and saltshakers. Walking (Mask and Hat) is a large image of a person shuffling down a sidewalk in heels; they are mostly out of frame and the photo is out of focus, suggesting that it was snapped accidentally (or maybe surreptitiously). A ceramic mask of a pouting primate hangs atop the photo in its bottom right corner, directly to the right of which is a brown hat. The Punisher’s Collections comprises two large, rotating aluminum drums, each with sneakers banging around inside it.
Rothfeld has noted that, whenever such disparate objects are made to coexist on “the same plane, they start to work together, or shift in and out of one another, deconstructing each other’s isolated meanings.” Does the large “5” in Felix’s Community enumerate the bric-a-brac it is looming over? Is the sculpted face in Walking (Mask and Hat) meant to belong to the walker, or to someone in their presence? Is the tumbling of The Punisher’s Collections supposed to accomplish something, or will the shoes just spin pointlessly on and on? These questions—and any others we might be compelled to ask about Rothfeld’s work—are unanswerable. They distract from how, despite their strangeness, the components of Rothfeld’s art often relate to each other in ways that seem structurally balanced and conceptually resolved. “It’s the act of breaking down ‘why this and not that’ that I am interested in,” she has said, “in taking away our subconscious readings in order to really consider the everyday.”
