Rachel Harrison at Bass Museum of Art

Rachel Harrison is best known for her colorful and witty work that addresses the conventions of art and mass culture.  Hovering between figuration and abstraction, her amorphous sculptures, often punctuated by everyday objects, provoke thoughtful consideration of contemporary life.  Harrison’s Voyage of the Beagle  Two (2008) is a study of modern-day menhirs, the prehistoric standing stones that represent the oldest figurative sculptures on earth.  In this series of 58 photographs, Harrison documents contemporary menhirs she discovered in sources as diverse as pop culture kitsch, nature and sculptures by Rodin and Brancusi.

The work is titled after Charles Darwin’s observational notes, taken aboard the HMS Beagle, which led to his theories on evolution. Rachel Harrison’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam among many others. She is currently the subject the exhibition “Gloria: Robert Rauschenberg & Rachel Harrison” on view at The Cleveland Museum of Art through October 25, 2015.