As If.
J.Rinehart Gallery. 2023
In her exhibition, As If, Lakshmi Muirhead groups together a display of paintings that embody the exploration of art without limitations or bounds. As If satisfies an audience of one—the artist themself—to revel in the process of making.
Within, As If, scale and materials matter, in the sense that they impose themselves upon the room and take up space; and that the materials require painstaking work and rework. Echoing the striations created in deep geological time, these works are also imbued with hours, days, weeks, and months spent in the sheer pleasure of the labor, not for futile production but as a deliberate choice.
The pleasure itself echoes an ecstatic sense of moving towards a tangible, physical result. The artist has made something, she has left a mark on the material and on the world, and perhaps has fulfilled a desire to enact what she was compelled to, without prescription. To be free of imposing presence and meaning is a declaration of existence that is as liberatory as any assertion.
Of her work, Muirhead says: “Can a work of art simply speak for itself, as if it were not made under scrutiny? The phrase, "as if", recalls a youthful declaration of refusal, of defiance; of making it clear that something will not happen, or could never. In the context of artmaking, it repudiates the notion that an artwork must be bound by obligation and constraints of purpose, as if it must mean something. An artist may liberate themselves through resistance, allowing the work to do as much as it can with limitations outside one's control. In this way it becomes expansive, and boundless. Maybe this is what freedom looks like for an artist: acting “as if” the work itself is autonomous”.
In Conversation with Lakshmi Muirhead and Sharon Arnold
Filmed in conjunction with her exhibition, As If, artist Lakshmi Muirhead and curator Sharon Arnold discuss labor, identity and mark making in this exclusive interview. Presented by J.Rinehart Gallery.