Charlotte Becket & Mary-Ann Monforton

La MaMa Galleria is proud to present Power Play, featuring the work of two sculptors, Charlotte Becket and Mary-Ann Monforton, curated by Roberto Juarez. At first glance, the work of the two artists seem disparate. Presented together reveals they both reflect upon systems that are fundamentally uncertain. Both bodies of work address a state of malfunction and collapse. Together, they navigate ideas of language and legibility, moving though a network of stymied signifiers that disrupt direction and orientation. At the center of this, they explore systems of information and modes of communication. Both speak to the times, displaying equal parts humor and pathos.

Charlotte Becket’s kinetic sculptures move slowly, sometimes imperceptibly, performing banal and subdued gestures. Their looping, rhythmic motion transforms the sculptures from motorized machines into figural abstractions or landscapes. Rigid symmetrical forms are punctuated with bulging rifts that slowly swell, in a moment of expansion or contraction. As the forms shift and redirect light they become hallucinogenic and unstable, subsisting in perpetually fracturing and rearranging circumstances. They creak and labor, endlessly moaning and muttering to themselves in an unresolved internal dialogue. The mechanization in these pieces works in opposition to what we demand of the mechanized world around us. Becket’s work seeks to offer something else, something that is slow and inefficient but more closely aligned with our selves. With her work, Becket muddles automation, information, consumerism, progress and erosion into a collapsed form that both celebrates and questions its status quo.

Mary-Ann Monforton’s work initially appears humorous and playful, but soon reveals itself to be dystopic in nature. She exploits the Do-It-Yourself quality of her work to render familiar trappings of social order—traffic signs and warnings—comical and pitiable. Directives and directions become soft and doubtful. Within this realm, she plays with semiotic ideas, exploring the social contract of the road sign, detaching it from context. In the piece “Anxiety,” the familiar road sign, offering black arrows on a yellow rectangle, indicating two-directions has been hazily reworked and edges softened to become a symbol of the inability to make a decision. In her work, instruction gives way to misperception and disinformation; signs and directional queues point to nowhere or inward. Monforton’s work presents a situation of second-guessing, and misdirection that directly affect the ways in which we navigate the world.