Let’s Play!
Exhibition Catalogue Essay commissioned by Onespace for Renee Kire’s solo exhibition 'Any way, shape or form’ 2023.
Do you remember Grimm’s building blocks? Those brightly painted wooden shapes, presented in neat, tessellated configurations. There is something so particular about the memory of innocent play elicited by those objects. The giddy tensity of assembling the blocks up, higher and higher, only for them to tumble to the ground in a rush of hollow clunks. You might have erratically mix-and-matched their vibrant, rainbow colours, or inquisitively investigated their curves, corners and gaps to find two shapes that slid satisfyingly into one another. Although these simple wooden shapes appear as a naïve cornerstone of human development, they speak to a pervasive truth: the impulse to explore form, colour, and shape without practical purpose expands our ability to conceive and perceive the world around us.
Employing the aesthetic simplicity of Minimalism, Renee Kire's exhibition Any way, shape or form explores this playful cognitive-learning foundation to reconsider our experience with art and space. Her vibrant geometric sculptures invite visitors into a lively and embodied installation, transforming Onespace into a conceptual playground. Rousing childlike curiosities, the exhibition guides us to revisit that formative space of interaction, learning, play and possibility.
Kire’s approach to Minimalism remains equally aware of how it physically exists in the ether as it does in the canon of art history. The artist denies the movement’s masculine notion that the art object must remain empty and straightforward, or as the influential American Minimalist painter Frank Stella bluntly describes, “what you see is what you see”.[1] Motivated by the legacy and practice of female pioneers of this 1960s movement, Kire creates objects that respond to and resurface the overlooked achievements of these artists. By merging Anne Truitt’s sympathy of colour with Carmen Herrera’s tension of form and Judy Chicago’s material sensitivity, the artist tugs on these feminist narratives with admiration and homage. The release of these historical dialogues demarcates Kire’s artmaking practice as a challenging of gendered aesthetic traditions of art, both past and present.
Theorist Anna Chave argues that if Donald Judd’s work was a person, “they would be described as the proverbial strong, silent type”.[2] Following this anthropomorphic exercise, Kire’s work could be described as a line of performers eagerly waiting for a ‘Hairspray’ casting call. This portrayal is owed to the exhibition’s dynamic forms, subjected to the personality of effervescent colour—an effect that urges you to pull each work out of its passive existence and into the realm of quirky personhood.
Understanding the energy that colour affords the form of an artwork, the artist confesses that her colour selection process, although initially led by a select pastel palette, eventually resulted in responding to the aura of a form. Works such as Sassy Squiggle make this process undeniably delightful. Snaking its way from the floor and craning its ‘neck’ toward the viewer, this elongated ‘S’ is confident and confrontational in its crayon purple coating. This animation of Kire’s work extends upon academic Michael Fried’s assertion that in the case of Minimalist sculpture, the work of art is simply incomplete without the spectator, confronting us like a “surrogate person”.[3]
Like the deception of an optical illusion, each artwork toys with perspective and conflated dimensions, subverting our preconceptions about how objects or materials behave. The artist achieves this effect by what she describes as “working against the materiality of the wood”[4], contorting it into flexible, warped compositions. Shapes curve, arc, lean and bend throughout the gallery space, treating the audience to a sculpture that squirms away from the expectations of presentation. Big ol’ shape, a powdery blue form reminiscent of an upside-down candy cane, towers the height of a human, while members of the aptly named ‘Offspring’ series could comfortably nestle into the crook of an arm. Several artworks precariously balance on the architecture of the space or one another, and others seem to defy the gravity of their construction. Employing counteractive techniques that unsettle perspective, Kire urges us to question what we are looking at and the effect of each object’s subversion.
Informal artwork arrangements, coupled with the endless possibility of presentation, imbue each work with a sense of limitless interpretation. This idea becomes even more obvious when attempting to understand the familiarity of each form—are they letters? An illegible alphabet? Almost, but not quite. Tapping this inkling right on the nose, Kire entitles a large red arc What letter am I? Perhaps it is an unruly ‘C’ that has taken an unfortunate nosedive? Though one truly cannot be sure, forms and shapes reminiscent of characters remind us that language is an abstract system through which worldviews are shaped and expressed.
Any way, shape or form is as much about the human experience as it is about the physicality of sculpture. As its title suggests, it unravels itself to the expanse of possibility. It teaches us that play, exploration, and imagination without a practical purpose are perhaps more critical to society—adults and children alike—than ever before. Despite being set within a milieu plagued by apprehension, the exhibition evokes themes of nostalgia, physicality, materiality and historical revisionism with zeal. Kire confronts the ambiguity of our contemporary experience with the unreserved joy there is in play for the sake of play.
[1] Susan Best, “Minimalism and Subjectivity: Aesthetics and Anti-Aesthetic Tradition”, in Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-Garde (London: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd, 2011), 13.
[2] Anna C. Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts (Harper Collins Publishers, 1992), 271.
[3] Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 155–156.
[4] Renee Kire, conversation with the author, 17 April 2023
Images by Louis Lim. Courtesy of Onespace & the artist.