This exhibition features solo shows by two contemporary American artists – Chakaia Booker and Katherine Taylor. Both sculptors utilize non-traditional materials in an investigation of identity, influenced by environment, culture, and history.

Chakaia Booker creates her sculptures primarily from recycled tires, which she sees as both material and metaphor with social, racial and environmental significance. Katherine Taylor works in clay, utilizing patterned porcelain in two groups of works that explore the body, and identity within a specific environment.

An important element in the work of both Booker and Taylor is an insistent materiality. As widely divergent as rubber and porcelain, one retains a keen awareness of the specific nature of each artist’s medium and the associations of varied applications, context, and history.

This material presence also emphasizes the fabrication process: the physical work of making art as well as related utilitarian commodities like tires, toilets, and teapots. This visible record of execution questions expectations of how an object would, or should be created by an artist. Craft continues to be a powerful element in contemporary art – often in unexpected ways.

Finally, an interest in pattern and the repetition of form also links the two. In both artists’ work, surface pattern occurs as an intrinsic part, rather than an applied surface. Composed of a dense aggregate of pattered elements, the sculptures demonstrate a rich and complex relationship between parts and whole.