Personals:
Small Objects for a Table

The exhibition Personals: small objects for a table is organized by artists Barb Smith, Gabriela Salazar and Sarah Mattes. It consists of small sculptures arranged together on four large tables, as if they were all in conversation. Although these objects originate from different artists and circumstances, putting them together in these tables is inherently about making room for others and connecting with one’s peers. As a lexicon of many small gestures, the reading of this sculptural vocabulary is based on the connections between the many parts. 

“[…] At a certain scale, sculpture can remind us of a body. At another, architecture. And yet another, landscape. Scaling down, sculpture peers back at us from the zone of model or talisman, veering (descending?) quickly into souvenir, trinket, tchotchke, junk. These are words loaded with judgment, and tenderness. What is it about being able to pick a sculpture up—cradle it in your arms or drop it in a pocket—that summons such ambivalence?

Our call for submissions of pieces smaller than 3.375 inches square and weighing 15 pounds or less solicited responses from almost 100 alumni from the classes of 1957 to 2017. As the pieces were being considered, fellow organizers Barb Smith, Sarah Mattes, and I quickly realized that we were no natural matchmakers. At any size, sculpture requires that the viewer contend with a material and its use. A small sculpture puts that material “at hand”: You can almost feel it, but imagining it so clearly in your palm creates a swift intimacy. We would take one from everyone, and the works would have to fend and flirt for themselves IRL. Moving our guests around until they fell into conversation was revealing. It became clear that the sculptures knew how to find kinship and context amongst themselves through form and substance.

When dating, you ask for what you want, think you want, or need. Along the way, consider merits, flaws, what your friends will like and are like, hypothetical genetics; then, question the stringency of your original requirements, the hypothetical preferences of your progenitors. Maybe you take one home. Maybe just take all 100 and see how they mingle. In aggregate, Personals was a work of community that made a new community, if just for a couple months, across the tables of the Skowhegan NYC. Taken individually, the sculptures offered possibilities for ways to seek some part of yourself in the creation of someone else.”

Gabriela Salazar