NINA BEIER
Baby
Beier’s work unfolds the histories enmeshed with serially produced objects and materials. She is drawn to those that have continually mutated and evolved as a result of transcultural exchange, reflecting on the fluctuating value assigned to them throughout the world at different times in history. The artist’s work offers space to contemplate the many and divergent meanings embedded and projected onto these objects. For example, her sculptural arrangements equally consider the cigar as handmade object, historically traded good, and symbol of power; they exist between an object, its representation, and our interpretation of it.
The eponymously titled series Baby comprises large waterbed mattresses suspended from the wall. Filled with pebbles, coins and water, the large membranes tensely bulge and sag, suggesting their "water may break." In the series Plug, bathroom sinks sit on the floor and hang from the walls of the gallery, stuffed with cigars that have been hand-rolled to fit perfectly and suggestively into their drain pipe openings.
Beier engenders dialogue between her chosen materials. Remote controlled cars and human hair, grand marble lions and beard trimmings, Mars bars and slabs of asphalt freshly cut from the street come together to create conversations in which material properties and sociopolitical baggage talk in circles. The works on view in Baby test how value is both constructed and undone, allowing a myriad of non-hierarchical interpretations.
CREDITS
Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York