Join us for a conversation in the Research and Development Store with artist Amy Podmore and former MASS MoCA Curatorial Assistant Meghan Clare Considine about Amy Podmore’s recent exhibition, Audience, and exhibition catalogue. They will be joined by poet and translator Jessica Fisher, who contributed a new poem to the catalogue.

Amy Podmore is propelled by an interest in surrealist strategies of transformation and the line between stillness and motion in sculpture.

In Audience, she offers enigmatic plaster casts of found wicker baskets and cornucopias. What we see as the exterior is actually the interior of these baskets, unfolding a vulnerable underbelly in the act of reversal. Podmore embeds motorized glass eyeballs into the woven warp and weft of the basket surfaces, still visible in the plaster translation. Defamiliarized, the molded baskets and their ranging, expressive forms adopt an almost anthropomorphic quality. As their eyes sleepily fall shut and whip open, the museum visitor becomes the one being uncannily watched back.

About the Artists:
Amy Podmore lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where she is currently the J.Kirk T. Varnedoe named professor of art at Williams College. She received her MFA from University of California, Davis, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Previous venues include the Tang Museum, Williams College Museum of Art, Bell Gallery (Brown University, Providence, RI), Allston Skirt Gallery (Boston, MA), Rose Art Museum (Brandeis University, Waltham, MA), DeCordova Museum and the ICA (Portland, ME).

Jessica Fisher is the author of three books of poetry: Frail-Craft, which won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Prize; Inmost, which was awarded the 2011 Nightboat Poetry Prize; and Daywork, which was released by Milkweed Editions this spring. Her poems appear in such journals as The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Bennington Review, The Colorado Review, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, Tin House, and TriQuarterly, and her translations have been published in The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review. She is co-editor, with Robert Hass, of The Addison Street Anthology. Her honors include the 2012 Rome Prize, a Holloway Postdoctoral Fellowship in Poetry, and a research grant from the Hellman Foundation. She holds a Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley and is currently an associate professor at Williams College. She lives with her family in Western Massachusetts.