Amy Podmore: Audience

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.
Exhibited in MASS MoCA’s Building Six, in the largest form Audience has taken to date, Podmore assumes implicit dialogue with Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), whose work is on view adjacent to her own and also features eyeballs. Generations apart, both artists nonetheless invoke whimsical forms and concepts of the gaze to consider the psychological uncanniness of the everyday.

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 exhibitions venues include the Tang Museum, Williams College Museum, 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).

MASS MoCA, 2024. 42 pages. 5 x 7inches.