THESE CHAIRS CAN TALK
Doris Salcedo’s retrospective at the Perez Art Museum shows her sculpture to great advantage. The large, bare, squarish concrete galleries it fills flow seamlessly into one another. Her sculptures, assemblages of found objects (furniture, clothing, hardware), are set out within them loosely and purposefully, pulling a visitor this way and that, in a state of semi-distraction, as she moves through.
Salcedo’s most powerful works, made from 1989 to 2008, take, slice, turn, reassemble, and seal shut with concrete traditional wood tables, chairs, bureaus, bed frames, and almirahs. This is the kind of furniture that filled our grandparents homes, and that can be found in thrift stores today. By recombining them and filling their voids with concrete the artist renders them useless, helpless, mute. The pieces are immaculately crafted; the wood frames are precisely cut and fastened, the concrete is poured to a soft sheen. Their careful syntactical play (a chair turned to face a wall, a table stacked upside-down within the frame of a dresser) engenders a sense of unease and confusion. Ominous questions arise: Whose bureau is this, and where is she now? Things are deeply and quietly out of order.
These are gorgeous sculptures. They recall Eva Hesse’s ability to infuse common materials with talismanic power, and Rachel Whiteread’s quiet disruption of conventional architectural scale and language. But what’s most remarkable is the power of each piece to speak – clearly and seriously – about silence, history, political oppression
and personal dignity, themes Salcedo has spoken about throughout her career. With works like this, she doesn’t need to say a word.
Installation View, Perez Art Museum Miami, 2016. Furniture by Doris Salcedo, 1989. Photo by World Red Eye, courtesy of Perez Art Museum and Doris Salcedo.