Exhibition view of Everything Once Arranged Has Become Scattered, with one of two pieces that comprise Hudspith’s sculptural diptych Wounds are to fissures, an invitation for a joining (2021) in the foreground.
Images by Gaby Davenprot & Manavi Singh, and courtesy of The Anderson.
Everything Once Arranged Has Become Scattered
Group exhibition, The Anderson Gallery
Richmond VA, USA
February 3 - March 3, 2023
Everything Once Arranged Has Become Scattered explores Pittsburgh as a site of repeats, rifts, and joints. The exhibition weaves together the work of thirteen artists including Kim Beck, N.E. Brown, Lenka Clayton, Jamie Earnest, Isla Hansen, Laura Hudspith, Sarah Kim, Phillip Andrew Lewis, Ross Mantle, Jake Reinhardt, Rebecca Shapass, Barbara Weissberger, and Alisha Wormsley interacting with their shared city. Much of the work involves an investigation of a deeply familiar place, as the artists interrogate the constructed thresholds on which they stand, confronting the truisms of the city. The artists connect with the city by digging through physical and metaphorical archives, reworking what they have discovered, or inserting their personal narrative into the city.
Drawing on roads, rubble, bodies, and other physical qualities that, when combined, make a city—much of the work exemplifies the uniqueness of a place. In an echoing of its industrial roots, Pittsburgh today serves as a reservoir for resourcefulness. Seemingly mundane elements are celebrated, and objects of the past transcend their own histories, made new with careful consideration for the future. Charged with self-awareness, humour, and drama, the works of the exhibition imbue humanity into even the most inhuman; cast concrete becomes limbs of bodies and rocks begin to impersonate one another. Using what is available and creating what isn’t, the artists excavate the Pittsburgh landscape for complexity and unearth new ways of seeing. A scattering can portend a re-coming together of a new, extraordinary composition. What will we find at the bottom of the mine?
Hudspith’s work titled Wounds are to fissures, an invitation for a joining (2021), reimagines illness and health, healing and being through a coetaneous collapsing and telescoping of bodily and earthen time/scales. In this sculptural diptych, macro and mirco are equalised in space. While one of the two standing arches in copper holds a stained glass vision unto a geological fissure in pink sandstone, the second arch telescopes inward imaging a wound cut through dermal tissues.
Wounds are to fissures, an invitation for a joining (2021) Stained glass, Himalayan salt, copper pipe and fittings, resin, solder. Diptych, each piece 46 x 18 x 34 inches
Other works by Hudspith also on view in Everything Once Arranged Has Become Scattered, not picutured here in detail, include Y/our body has its own intelligence, I believe (2022) – a wall-based work that features an except from peom “Atomic Desire” by the artist, as articulated through a ‘rune’ language created from an archive of medical suture shapes. This piece is pictured in the background of the first image.
Y/our body has its own intelligence, I believe (2022) Pigmented and cast resin, acrylic dowel. 60 x 2 x 48 inches