Rachel Harrison at Astrup Fearnley Museet

The largest show by American artist Rachel Harrison in Scandinavia will debut on September 30 at the Astrup Fearnley Museum. Sitting in a Room emphasizes current practice while incorporating a variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, photography, and painting.

 

Harrison’s deft, multi-layered artistic process defies simple classification. As formalist concerns are pushed to compete with renegade elements from the outer world, abstraction is laced with vernacular reference to startling, frequently comedic effect. In order to level hierarchies through a democratizing process of filtering and accumulation, cultural artifacts, the history of art, and space itself are subjected to new scrutiny. By using the very means of transportation used to ship and store the commercial objects that populate her work, Harrison frequently uses packing crates or random cardboard boxes as the material for her creations, blurring the line between sculpture and base.

 

Harrison’s room-scaled approach to this exhibition, which gets its name from a 1969 piece of sound art by Alvin Lucier, I Am Sitting in a Room, also demonstrates this awareness of the context in which art exists. The artist designed the five designated galleries as separate rooms, naming them Sculpture Court, Town Square, Gym, Living Room, and Cabinet. The works are arranged to put the visitor in both private and public settings. The exhibition, which Harrison defines as neither a survey nor a retrospective but rather an intuitive remapping of the conceptual coordinates of her most recent work, explores setting in its numerous guises.