Mary-Ann Monforton - "Sanctuary" exhibition catalog

MARY-ANN MONFORTON SANCTUARY

MARY-ANN MONFORTON Sanctuary Dedicated to Clara Elizabeth Monforton 1926 - 2012

The Gentle Hammer of Pathetic Sculpture In its totality, the sculptural oeuvre of Mary-Ann Monforton is a kind of rickety house of cards—bold, playful, and intuitive yet also reflective and symbolic in its allusions to the impermanence of all life and all matter, including our manmade constructions (which include art). The artist remakes stuff, mostly mundane and recognizable things, which she reimagines in shapes that are subtly awkward and cartoonish. The rendered objects or subjects—among them toys, animals, and plants—appear crooked, flawed, aging, and imperfect. The crudeness of the imitation is both inherent and desired; it lends the sculptures character and almost humanizes them. It’s easy to relate to these objects’ personalities, which Monforton affectionately refers to as “at once tender and tragic.” The artist fully embraces her creations’ “pathetic” nature, and there’s no denying that they get under our skin. No matter what the objects represent, as they stoop, droop, and surrender to gravity, they remind us of the frailty of our own existence.

Monforton crafts most of her sculptures using wire mesh and plaster (or cement and, in some cases, resin) and then paints them with acrylics, or a concoction of paint mixed with concrete powder. They are “concretized” objects, and the artist doesn’t belabor them. They are made with genuine yet intentional spontaneity and a keen sense for when to stop. One could say Monforton’s works are close to street art in their lack of preciousness; their outcome depends on the material’s ability to “perform” in a short window of time.

Interestingly, Monforton returned to the studio only seven years ago, after a forty-year hiatus from artmaking during which she pursued other interests. In 2013, she picked up her practice right where she had left off in the early ’70s: experimenting with tentative lines and nonsolid shapes, making works that were uneven, unstable, and off-kilter. Sculptor Eva Hesse is among the post-minimal artists whose profound influence lingered for Monforton. Hesse’s drapes of cords, wonky grids, and coils, along with her tireless investigations into repetition and “structure versus disorder” are still an inspiration.

From my first studio visit with Monforton in Brooklyn around 2014, I recall wobbly-edged, stacked wire cuboids of varying dimensions posing as a sort of disobedient variant of Sol Lewitt’s modular cubes.

With a brick-size version of these hollow units, Monforton “boarded up” her studio window in symbolic solidarity with her hometown of Detroit, protesting the dilapidated state of the city’s vacant buildings.

This is one of many instances where the artist’s work responds to topical American, or global, realities.

Around the same time, Monforton started making clouds with wire, which were substantial only in their outlines, like drawings in space. These wire clouds have remained a constant in the artist’s work, like a nagging question in our increasingly virtual lives: What’s in a cloud? (Hint: not data.) There

is something distressing about technology hijacking and capitalizing terms from nature; words like cloud, apple, and twitter can no longer be uttered without the specter of big tech.

A few years ago, Monforton created several massive yet hollow Doric-style columns. They were made of individual lengths of white rope hung in circles from 36-foot ceilings, and you could step inside their empty centers. Gleefully emasculating the authority of the classic column—the pillar of Western civilization, the symbol of colonial power and white supremacy—the artist rendered it feeble and pathetic.

In 2018, in a two-person exhibition titled Power Play, Monforton presented a series of flabby, enfeebled traffic signs made of wire mesh, plaster, and paint. Alluding to the omnipresence of rules in our everyday lives—from stop and caution signs to one-way arrows to a litany of commands that could go on forever—Monforton’s directions surrendered their authority in ways that were both hilarious and moving.

Although the final sculpture may not reveal what triggered its making, the energy of the original impetus is always there. Many of Monforton’s works react to current discourse, for instance on the enduring inequalities in this country. Take her sporting equipment—a series of works in response to the rampant racism in the US major leagues. In 2016, when quarterback Colin Kaepernick started taking a knee during the anthem to protest racial injustice, Monforton kicked off a series of dented baseballs, footballs, and soccer balls, along with other tormented ball-game equipment.

After the El Paso shooting in August 2019, Monforton made one hundred life-size white plaster flowers and pinned them up on her studio wall as a memorial to the victims. When the COVID pandemic struck the following spring and people succumbed by the thousands, Monforton decided to paint the flowers in vibrant colors, but only on their insides. As if to affirm life in the face of so much death, she also started to make delicate birds and a poignant series of tree stumps for them to perch on.

Some of the flowers and birds are part of Monforton’s new exhibition, which is on view after a grueling election and while the city catches its breath before heading into another lockdown. The show is titled Sanctuary, and that’s exactly what it is. In a time when radical unpredictability pervades all aspects of our lives, Monforton offers a garden of nostalgic delights, one that both exposes and plays with our illusions.

It’s hard not to feel melancholically at home among the sculpted life-size children’s toys: an exhausted red Radio Flyer wagon; a flimsy swing set; a chewed-up hula hoop; a buckled, injured tricycle; and a set of crumpled painted-plaster balloons. But innocence is as flighty as memory, and what was once

innocuous play has left dents and scars. It’s in childhood where our delusions and exploitations begin.

That’s why Sanctuary is also a haven for several sculpted “toy” animals, including a baby rhinoceros, a polar bear, and a giraffe, all smaller than life and lovingly constructed and painted by the artist.

Generally, it’s rather rare that we walk into an art exhibition and feel compelled to exclaim how cute and adorable we find the work. Here, the aww effect soon gives way to more somber reflections when we realize that several of the animals in this sanctuary are threatened by extinction in the wild. The way we play, objectify, domesticate, or else manipulate other lifeforms—in our thoughts, speech, and actions—is part and parcel of what makes them vanish. The sanctuaries we create are yet another fabrication of the mind.

Monforton, however, is not wagging her finger but using what she calls the “gentle hammer,” making her sculptures come alive by foregrounding their vulnerability, a quality we humans share. To be protectors, we must feel empathy, and the artist triggers exactly that sensation in us. We tend to forget how everything is prone to decay and disappearance, be it ourselves, or our natural or man-made surroundings. These days, however, we all can’t help feeling acutely, and globally, that life as we know it is hanging by a thread. Sculptures won’t give answers to our urgent questions. But the forms Monforton makes, as futile and fleeting they may be, do communicate. They have been there for a while; we just haven’t paid emotional attention.

Sabine Russ, 2020

Sabine Russ is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. She’s the senior editor of BOMB Magazine.

Soccer, 2018, wire mesh, plaster gauze, graphite, acrylic, 10” x 16” x 16”

Radio Flyer, 2019, wire mesh, plaster gauze, acrylic, cardboard, 39” x 18” x 14”

Balloons, 2020, wire mesh, plaster gauze, acrylic, rope, approx. 10” x 10” x 52” each

Tricycle, 2019, cast resin (edition of 3), 26” x 21” x 23”

Duck, 2020, wire mesh, acrylic, plaster gauze, cardboard, 16” x 18” x 40”

Rhino Calf, 2020, wire mesh, plaster gauze, synthetic mortar, concrete, charcoal, 21” x 17” x 30”

Polar Bear Cub, 2020, wire mesh, acrylic, plaster gauze, 15” x 17” x 24”

Swing, 2020, wire mesh, acrylic, plaster gauze, rope, 9.5” x 22” x 2”

Hula Hoop, 2020, wire mesh, acrylic, plaster gauze, 35” x 32” x 3”

Baby Giraffe, 2020, wire mesh, acrylic, plaster gauze, graphite, 77” x 14” x 44”

Toucan, 2020, wire mesh, plaster gauze, wooden dowel, paint, pencil, 14” x 16” x 33”

Squirrel and Stump, 2020, wire mesh, acrylic, plaster gauze, graphite, 23” x 19” x 17” following pages: Woodpecker, 2020, wire mesh, acrylic, plaster gauze, 5.75” x 8” x 3.5” Forest, 2020, wire mesh, acrylic, plaster gauze, graphite, dimensions variable

Rhino Calf, 2020, pastel, graphite, acrylic on paper, 14” x 11”

Stump, 2020, pastel, graphite, acrylic on paper, 11” x 14”

Polar Bear Cub, 2020, pastel, graphite, acrylic on paper, 14” x 11” Baby Giraffe, 2020, pastel, graphite, acrylic on paper, 14” x 11”

Forest, 2020, pastel, graphite, acrylic on paper, 14” x 11”

Bouquets, 2020, wire mesh, acrylic, plaster gauze, graphite, dimensions variable

Flowers in a Delft Vase, 2020, wire meash, plaster gauze, acrylic, graphite, 15” x 15” x 9”

Mary-Ann Monforton b. Windsor Ontario, Canada EDUCATION Bachelor of Fine Arts, Sculpture, Aquinas College, Grand Rapids, MI ​ ​ SELECTED EXHIBITIONS 2020 Sanctuary, High Noon, New York, NY, November 12 - December 27 2019 Spring Break 2019, Curated by Robin Winters and Brigitte Engler, March 2019 Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat, Contemporary Art Toledo, Toledo OH, January 25 - March 22 ​2018 Charlotte Beckett and Mary-Ann Monforton, 2 person exhibition, La MaMa Galleria, NYC, October 2018 Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat, Maier Museum, Lynchburg VA, September 2018 Summer Lovin, Mattress Gallery, NYC, Group Show, June 2018 2D or not 2D, Mattress Gallery, NYC, Group Show, May 2018 Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat, Howl! Happening, NYC, May 2018 ​ 017 2 BRIC’s 2017 OPEN (C)ALL: TRUTH exhibition, Brooklyn, NY November-December 2017 Mary-Ann Monforton and Lawrence Swan, Valentine Gallery, Ridgewood, NY, Jan. 6 - Feb. 5, 2017 Lintel, Mantel, Module, Shelf, with Lauren Bakst & Yuri Masnyj, Elliot Jerome Brown, Mary-Ann Monforton, Gahee Park, Isasc Pool, Curated by Samuel Draxler, La MaMa La Galleria Jan. 7 – Feb 4, 2017 ​2016 Family Show, La MaMa Galleria, Dec. 2015 Open–Studio with Anita Glesta, Hovey Brock, June 2016 ​ 015 2 Family Show, La MaMa Galleria, Dec. 2015 2014 Visual Aids, Benefit Auction, Luhring Augustine Family Show, La MaMa Galleria, Dec. 2014

CURATORIAL PROJECTS Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat, Howl Arts, NYC, May 13 – June 10 2018 Maier Museum, Lynchburg VA. September 14 – December 14, 2018 Contemporary Art Toledo, January 25- March 22 Bobbie Oliver: Paintings, Valentine Gallery, Ridgewood, NY, 2015 Pattern of War, Paintings by the late Leonard Rosenfeld, La MaMa Galleria NYC, 2015 Arch Connelly, La MaMa Galleria NYC, March 2012 Jane Dickson, Almost Home, Galapagos Art & Performance Space, Williamsburg, NY, 1999 Dennis Oppenheim, Blue Collar, Galapagos Art & Performance Space, Williamsburg, NY, 1998 Graffiti, Klarfeld Perry Gallery, NYC, 1992 Kings of Spray, Flow Ace Gallery, Los Angeles, California, 1985

Mary-Ann Monforton | Sanctuary November 12 - December 27, 2020

Edition of 100

Publisher © 2020 Jared Linge HIGH NOON GALLERY

Art © 2018 - 2020 Mary-Ann Monforton Text © 2020 Sabine Russ

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reprinted or reproduced in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, without prior permission from the publisher.

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