Lily Cox-Richard: Stringer Lode

She Works Flexible presents Lily Cox-Richard: Stringer Lode. Opening reception: February 19, 7-9pm. Exhibition on view through April 9, 2016.

Stringer Lode will conclude this round of programming at our current location, followed by projects organized by curatorial residents Andy Campbell and Nicole Burisch.

This exhibition inaugurates a new body of work for Lily Cox-Richard, centered on the systems, widespread but largely unnoticed, that undergird more conspicuous structures.

Mycelia, the fungal equivalent of a root system, can sprawl wider than football fields, invisible but for a few mushroom caps. Cottage industries, far from the heaving global marketplace, provide solid local economic footing and hark back to social arrangements that will more than likely never be completely displaced. And the plumbing and wiring in our walls really only get our attention when they stop working.

These systems are successful in no small part because they go unremarked; if most public acclaim is reserved for the loudest, the grandest, and the most exceptional, these networks assert the value of dispersion, interdependence, and restraint. So there’s a twist to Cox-Richard’s celebration of the overlooked: in rendering them visible, she subverts their natural assets.

It’s an irony echoed in the show title’s allusion to mining: a stringer lode, unlike a concentrated mother lode, is a fine lacework of veins.  To get at the ore a miner needs to demolish the countryside and sift the rubble.

Delicacy, context and continuity fall prey to blunt, analytical differentiation. That sense of dislocation – of an object designed for connection newly isolated – gives Cox-Richard’s sculptures their eerie potency. For Wattle and Daub she sets plaster casts of woven baskets into the gallery wall, recessed like niches.

Though they allude to practical handiwork and craft economies, their uselessness as receptacles implicates them in a very different system of evaluation.  Their placement – a little too low, a little too close to a corner – likewise interrupts the typical function of the wall, both in terms of display and support.  They are as much breach as sculpture.

The carved columns in Cistern depict stacks of five-gallon buckets repurposed for DIY mushroom cultivation. Many mycologists today believe that mushrooms can mitigate or even reverse damages inflicted on the environment by cleaning up pollutants, rehabilitating depleted soil, and growing renewable building materials.  Cox-Richard’s floor-to-ceiling columns, though not in fact structural, embody that optimism, implying reinforcement and ascendant ambition.

She Works Flexible was conceived more as a point of convergence and exchange than a simple exhibition space; intersection and communal support have informed programming at least as much as discrete display items. So Cox-Richard’s hybrid object-systems are a fitting final show for this space: they reconfirm the virtue of vast, if delicate, interrelationships and assure us that a large proportion of the world’s essential work transpires out of sight.

Lily Cox-Richard’s sculptures engage cultural and material histories of vernacular forms like lightning rods, neoclassical sculpture, and sweetgrass baskets. Solo exhibitions include Hirschl & Adler Modern (New York), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), and the Hudson River Museum (New York). LCR has been awarded an Artadia grant, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a postdoctoral fellowship in the University of Michigan’s Society of Fellows, and residencies at the Core Program, Millay Colony, and the MacDowell Colony, and will be in residence at Artpace in Fall 2016.

LCR lives and works in Houston, and is the Critical Initiative Coordinator for the Core Residency Program.

February 24, 7-9pm
Reading and Conversation between poet Tung-Hui Hu and artist Lily Cox-Richard
Tung-Hui Hu reads from his recent book A Prehistory of the Cloud, and joins Lily Cox-Richard to discuss relationships between art practices, media, and the hidden infrastructures around us.

In A Prehistory of the Cloud, Hu shows that the cloud grew out of such older networks as railroad tracks, sewer lines, and television circuits. Hu argues that the cloud grafts digital technologies onto older ways of exerting power over a population. But because we invest the cloud with cultural fantasies about security and participation, we fail to recognize its militarized origins and ideology.

Tung-Hui Hu is also the author of three books of poetry, The Book of Motion (2003), Mine (2007), and Greenhouses, Lighthouses (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). He has received awards from Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, the NEA, and the San Francisco Foundation. A former network engineer, Hu now teaches poetry and digital studies at the University of Michigan.

Pictured: Lily Cox-Richard, study for Wattle and Daub, 2015 (detail above, full image below).