With the exhibition “Modular Woman”, the Russian-born artist Irina Lotarevich continued her long sculptural confrontation with the processes of normalization and optimization, and with the mechanisms of power that maintain social systems. By using casting and other techniques with metals such as stainless steel, aluminum, silver and pewter, she develops a physical relationship with her materials. Pieces ranging from large, almost human-sized objects to small, jewel-like charms reference the architecture and comment on the work.
Many of his new works take up the primary form of a box or container as a unit, module, measure, for exampleModular body (container section), UnitAnd Dual relationship (all works 2023). Invoking Le Corbusier’s iconic Modernist housing unit (1947-1952) – a housing complex developed to the architect’s anthropometric scale of proportions, the Modulor, based on the conventional six-foot stature of male detectives in English mystery novels – Lotarevich questions not only the masculine ideal of his buildings, but the existence of universal standards in general. “Modular: A problem of the ego by which I mean the self is but one more piece,” writes Miriam Stoney in a generous expository text. Lotarevich uses his own body (“Woman: almost whole,” writes Stoney) as a physical referent in Steel price index. Long vertical strip of steel, almost like a large ruler, the work is at the height of the artist. The information engraved on its surface reproduces the first page of the most recent catalog of a steel supplier in Vienna. The fluctuating and unpredictable price of steel is closely linked to world events and markets, as well as to the artist and his craft.
The elegant manufacture Overtime and pedagogy is a relatively small, free-standing constellation of twenty-one compact plexiglass frames that unfurl from a curved support, each frame preserving a week’s worth of shavings from the metal shop at the university where Lotarevich teaches. If the compact wall sculpture Housing anxiety 7—consisting of more than eighty small metal boxes nestled in its front and side compartments, with chains and hooks hanging from the bottom—a reflection on the precariousness of habitat systems, Overtime and pedagogy, an accumulation of time and matter, literally “houses” the remains of the anxieties and aspirations of his colleagues. These delicate allusions to his personal sphere contribute to the vitality of Lotarevitch’s work. It feels cold and numb, conveying a certain unease that matches the growing anxieties and competitiveness of the present while somehow remaining soft and vulnerable (emphasized by manual labor and the changing character of steel, which is not not immune to human touch and reacts to the environment).
An eerie but oddly charming inclusion, tiny silver and pewter pigeons perch above Unit And Housing anxiety 7, respectively. The pigeon, which is said to be one of the first species domesticated by man, is a symbol of freedom but is also considered, wrongly, as a carrier of disease. A resilient creature, target of extermination and biotech breeding, the pigeon is what Donna Haraway, in stay with the problem (2016), called “a cherished parent and a despised pest” – an example of how actors (human or non-human) are easily classified as either/or rather than observed in all their complexity and relationality. In their strict order and logic, some of Lotarevich’s sculptures resemble the structures of hard drives and servers, like analog representations of technological information systems. Turning away from human exceptionalism and Le Corbusier’s obsession with (masculine) anthropometric scale and standardization, we discover a world teeming with connections between living and non-living structures, in which the “living” n Often the rest of human labor is a by-product of standardized living.
