SceneHepworth

Rachel McRae

A Space Windows

February 12 – April 8, 2016

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SceneHepworth is an amalgamation of “Barbara Hepworth” and “Scene Kid”. Hepworth’s sculptures exemplify an “agreeable” kind of Modernism: rounded, evocative, ambiguous. Hepworth created a proto-meme, ubiquitous sculptural “brand” long before we began to talk about the output of “creatives” in this way. Picture the decorative objects in entry ways of mid-level furniture showrooms. Think of the rounded forms littering backgrounds of "Cultured Bourgeoisie Office/Condo" scenes in cartoons, television, movies. “Hepworths” are everywhere. The smooth, stone “anyone” face is a “pareidolia”—a vague stimulus perceived as significant and clear. “Hepworths” are classically now, effortlessly (M)odern.

 

Each mask is titled in sequence after completion, mimicking a common method of naming grouped image files on a computer. This series of masks merges Hepworth-like forms with hairstyles taken from Scene Kids, a dead youth culture formed on the social-networking site MySpace. Teenagers combined visual signifiers from former subcultures, variations of the same multi-colored, hair-extension augmented hairstyle, to create bobble headed faces with the same locks captured on innumerable selfies still drifting around the Internet. Hepworth’s face-like stone meets cheap extensions, a timeless proto-meme and a dated online-scene: both heavily affected by repetition, their brand, their meme-status.

Biographies

Rachel McRae is an artist & writer who splits her time between London (UK), Los Angeles (USA) and Port Dover (CA). Her work has been shown at numerous venues, including the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) London and most recently at Full Haus (Los Angeles) & Pi Artworks (London). Her work is in the collection of the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG). She received her BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design and her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts.