LINCOLN, MA.- DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum announced the installation of Tory Fair’s Testing a World View (Again), the seventh project in the PLATFORM series, on view July 23, 2011 through Spring 2012. Boston-based sculptor Tory Fair creates objects and installations that address the transitional space between the real and imagined, what is physical and what is felt. In her most recent work she focuses her explorations on the relationship between the body and nature through cast, figurative sculpture.
As part of deCordova’s ongoing PLATFORM series, in which emerging and mid career artists are invited to create work specifically for the site, Fair’s installation highlights deCordova as a venue for indoor and outdoor contemporary art. As Fair notes, “our imagination [is] part of our resources and part of our nature. My sculptures intend to endorse the perception that nature is the imagination; that nature is ourselves; and that nature is our surroundings—however urban, deserted, bucolic, or wild they may be.”
Testing a World View (Again) is a site-inspired installation on the Pollack Family Terrace, a small balcony off of the Museum’s third floor galleries. Fair casts her body in a seated, contemplative pose in pink resin. This cast gesture creates a simple, 90-degree angle. Flowers swarm her head as materialized thoughts which are alive as they press and impress a relationship to the world. Four of these resin figures are sited on the terrace in unexpected positions to suggest both humor and humility in the experience of the body in contact with its variable surroundings.
Testing a World View (Again) also directly references the work of British sculptor Antony Gormley, whose work Reflection II, 2008 greets deCordova’s visitors at the Museum’s entrance. In 1993 he presented Testing a World View, an installation of five identical cast iron figures of his own body at right angles posed throughout a museum gallery, articulating the different relationships between the human figure and architectural space, and between interior and exterior experiences. Fair reinterprets Gormley's seminal work in an outdoor gallery space with her own figure, in pink resin, and covered with flowers. Her feminist re-articulation of an earlier and perhaps more masculine work expands the question of our bodies’ strained relationship to the world to now encompass the gendered body and both the built and natural worlds.
The 2010-2011 PLATFORM series is generously funded by James and Audrey Foster. Testing a World View (Again) is also supported by the Theodore and Jane Norman Fund for Faculty Research and Creative Projects at Brandeis University.
