FONS ÀUDIO #9
Rita McBride
Rita McBride’s works explore the boundaries between architecture, sculpture and installation. She focuses on seemingly secondary urban elements and takes them out of their context, changing their scale, their materials and their relationship to the surrounding space.
Parking lots, bleachers, pipes, HVAC units, water towers and awnings are just some of the targets of McBride’s metaphorical transformations. After an initial moment of recognition and familiarity, viewers who confront her works go through an alienation phase that forces them to rethink their relationship to the actual exhibition event, and to question the meaning that we usually attribute to spaces and materials. Her use of materials such us raffia, Venetian glass, Carrara marble, bronze and canvas in connection with ordinary urban elements shows the inherent contradictions between mass production and craftsmanship, between high and low culture.
The architecture of modernity, industrial design and minimalist sculpture are three fundamental influences that we can trace through her work, and which McBride tackles with an analytical, critical spirit that is not without irony.
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