Repose
2020
Marissa Lee Benedict, Daniel de Paula and David Rueter; comissioned by ︎︎︎The Arts Club of Chicago.
CNCed and laminated baltic birch plywood and insulation foam, pine, steel.
Fabricated by ︎︎︎Navillus WoodWorks and supported by a grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art.
___
Site-adapted to the garden of The Arts Club of Chicago's sculpture garden, Repose is a subtly strange arrangement: the lining of a massive shipping crate, installed in the garden of a historic arts institution, ostensibly as the work of art itself.
The panels appears to be designed to support a large, missing object.
As the viewer circles the sculpture (not-sculpture), the crating material – a MacGuffiffin keeping the narrative moving despite its potential lack of intrinsic importance – flips in and out of focus as the eye moves between negative and positive space, searching for the phantom subject of the work.
In 2018, de Paula, Benedict and Rueter collaboratively salvaged the last remaining corn commodities trading pit from the Chicago Board of Trade’s de-commissioned grain room, and placed it in storage, awaiting future exhibition. Repose is a sculpture made of the components of a speculative shipping crate, built to house a piece of this commodities trading pit (one of the unique, triangularly shaped, 3-meter in length, central wedges) as it circulates the art world. According to the sharp angles of Repose, the suggested piece of the trading pit floor would be suspended within the crate, flipped upside down, tilted and spun sideways as only a CAD rendering can do. The shipping crate – drawn and fabricated to contain a fragment of a platform that itself was drawn and fabricated to contain bodies for speculating on futures contracts – sits quietly on display. Playing with looping continuities between modernist sculpture, negation, and global logistics, Repose embodies a hallucinatory stillness; one descriptive of a proposed state of extended circulation and suspension.