The connection is easy, and chilling: Harrison looks from relics of an ugly past to a darkening future, ruled by overlords like labor-antagonizing, Twitter-grandstanding Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk. The artist takes particular aim at Tesla, encasing headlights from a Model X in resin blocks tinted a shadowy near-black (“Wraith,” 2021). (Harrison has routered into several of these works, too, a by-hand gesture in the context of the automotive industry, an early adopter of replacing human workers with robots.) The explicit idea - of organized labor and workers’ rights as entombed relics, victims of post-industrial economy - is blunt and resonant amid the hard slog of current union efforts at new-economy behemoths such as Amazon and Starbucks. The works share an ethic of blunt dehumanization with the African pieces. Look closely, and you’ll see bubbles along their rough surfaces, air trapped as though a last breath, flash-frozen in place. Mississippians voted to approve the flag design on November 3, 2020. For decades, museums encased countless objects in vitrines as lifeless relics of colonial pillage - culture, safely under glass - a practice Harrison pushes to a suffocating extreme. Lamar Jackson 2019 NFL MVP & Ravens NFL 100th Legacy Art Football Set With Display. Collectively, they call out a century’s worth of ethnographic museum display that simultaneously fetishized and sterilized their significance. They’re uniformly conflicting, equal parts seductive beauty and ominous threat, though the pieces that use African objects have a clear-eyed particularity.
“Robota,” his solo exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, includes a mixed bag of objects - carved wooden African masks and figures car parts factory worker accoutrement like hard hats and gloves - cast in thick transparent blocks of resin, making them eerily lush and sleek. CAMBRIDGE - With his unsettling sculptural work, Matthew Angelo Harrison aims for so many conceptual bull’s-eyes at once that he runs the risk of being a little too on the nose.
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