Summary Of Explorer By Rita Mcbride

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Rita McBride has a way with words. Explorer, the exhibition's title, is at once tongue-in-cheek and accurate. Immediately following the artist's name, it suggests that McBride is herself an explorer, which is true of all good artists. However, she punctures the term's bravura with her dry humour. She spotted the shiny logo on the back of a Ford Explorer, struck perhaps by the irony of branding: a car that offers the promise of the open road, stuck in a traffic jam.' Quotation is typical of McBride's approach, whether in words or forms. She has a particularly sharp eye for shapes and structures in our urban environment that usually go unnoticed: air conditioning units, vents, pipes, skylights, telecommunications boxes. McBride transforms their …show more content…

Or it could mean that we as artists explore fully the institutional mechanisms that we inhabit and that support us." However, she punctures the term's bravura with her dry humour. She spotted the shiny logo on the back of a Ford Explorer, struck perhaps by the irony of branding: a car that offers the promise of the open road, stuck in a traffic jam.' Quotation is typical of McBride's approach, whether in words or forms. She has a particularly sharp eye for shapes and structures in our urban environment that usually go unnoticed: air conditioning units, vents, pipes, skylights, telecommunications boxes. McBride transforms their typical materials or shifts their scale to create sculptures that explore the tensions between functionalism and formalism. However, quoting other sources is not simply about "shifting an item from one context to another; in her hands it became a form of translation with all the distortions and misunderstandings that this implies."' These works are not readymades: even when she maintains the scale of the original, she alters its material, bringing new connotations to the form. As she once declared: "Materials are not just …show more content…

Even when they include images — which only two of the thirty works presented here do—their objecthood is stressed, with a physicality and materiality that is key to their

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