Liz Glynn The Archaeology of Another Possible Future

Los Angeles-based artist Liz Glynn presents her most ambitious project to date in MASS MoCA’s signature Building 5 gallery, a sprawling sculptural experience of sight, sensation, sound, and scent stretching nearly a football field in length. The Archaeology of Another Possible Future expands Glynn’s interest in the rise and fall of empires, the assignment of cultural value, and labor and production. This multi-level presentation — which invites viewers to experience the museum’s former factory spaces from catwalks 18 feet above the floor — examines our physical and psychological relationship to our increasingly abstracted world. Glynn is particularly interested in the shift from a material-based economy to one in which technology companies seem to generate billion dollar valuations out of thin air, nanotechnology continues to operate beyond the field of the visually apprehensible, and capital is accumulated as a pure concept. Glynn seeks to reconcile the presence of physical bodies and individual subjectivities within this contemporary state, emphasizing the experience of physical movement in time and space by creating a two-tiered labyrinth. She suggests the sense of ephemeralization through elevated walkways and platforms that host digital printers above while presenting abstract sculptures below that translate abstract data into three-dimensional, nearly tectonic forms and cave-like structures made of shipping pallets that host a number of analog sensory experiences, focusing on touch, sound, and scent.

 

Liz Glynn: Open House is now on view in Boston transforming the Commonwealth Avenue Mall West into an open-air ruin of a ballroom through November 4, 2018. In this contemporary re-imagining of a historically exclusive space, Glynn addresses the evolving face of a city: who has access to space in a society that is increasingly divided along socio-economic lines? And how can we use history to shape a different future?

Principal exhibition support is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Barbara and Andrew Gundlach, and the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.

Major support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger, The Mohn Family Foundation, and Formlabs. Contributing support is provided by Stacy and John Rubeli, Girardi Distributors LLC, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Barr Foundation, the Mass Cultural Council, Pam and Alix Karlan, and Guido’s Fresh Marketplace.

Installation view of Liz Glynn: The Archaeology of Another Possible Future
Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York