ADDITIONAL WORK: 2016-2019
Photo: Etienne Frossard
Seedling Carrier, 2019
Aluminum, wood, air-dried clay, epoxy clay, ceramic, paint, Aqua-Resin, wire, 5 x 7 x 3 ft
In Light of Shade
Fergus McCaffrey
February 27 - April 19, 2019
https://fergusmccaffrey.com/exhibition/in-light-of-shade/
A Garden of Promise and Dissent
The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art
October 17, 2024 - March 16, 2025
https://thealdrich.org/exhibitions/a-garden-of-promise-and-dissent
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/arts/design/american-museums-galleries-art-guide.html
I developed this work after finding many technical drawings (similar to blueprints) that depict specialized containers used on British and French expeditions to the Pacific in the mid-to-late 1700s. They were not ordinary crates, they were inventions that kept plants alive over year-long voyages---plants that guaranteed wealth for empire, or plants valued for their rarity. I noticed they varied in appearance, resembling cabinets, tombs, baby cribs, dollhouses, animal hutches, animal traps, and reliquaries. These associations relate to the body which seemed crucial to the work I wanted to create.
A nursery is a place of care and nourishment—referring to a room in a house where young children are raised, or a place to propagate and grow plants. Visible inside my sculpture are porcelain planter pots now broken—evoking an abandoned garden nursery or an archaeological site. I hand-sculpted the flowers, leaves, vines, and seed pods from clay. No longer soft, their rigidity reminds me of bones, porcelain, and bleached coral. Leaves are never white—to me, the all-white sculpture connotes loss, and something ghostly, ethereal, even deathly. I think of environmental damage due to climate change, yet I also want to bring forward a sense of regeneration and possibilities for remediation. I surrounded the sculpture with seed pods, placed on the floor as if they have dropped from the vine and are about to release their enclosed seeds. A seed pod is similar to a uterus—nourishing and protecting seeds until maturation, and then releasing the seeds into the world, perhaps with silky parachutes for their journey. The other association of the tomb was not about an interned body, but it does reference the emotional or psychological aspect of entrapment within the home or any other confining situation, and a desire for release. I also thought about separation and fear, and the ‘little deaths’ and losses that are part of transformation and unknown, uncertain journeys.
Photo: Etienne Frossard
Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, 2016-2018
Glazed ceramic, digital printed adhesive vinyl, paint, concrete; 14 x 14 x 5 ft
Hunter College, 205 Hudson Gallery, New York, NY (April-May 2018)
https://www.huntermfastudio.org/mfa-thesis-exhibitions/spring-2018/rachelle-dang
Press:
Hyperallergic, “Laughter and Tears in Hunter College’s MFA Thesis Show (Zachary Small, May 2018)
https://hyperallergic.com/444514/hunter-college-2018-mfa-thesis-exhibition/
Photo: Zorawar Sidhu
Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, 2016-2018
Glazed ceramic, steel, paint, digital printed adhesive vinyl; 9 x 12.5 x 2 ft
SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, NY, 2018
Press:
Hyperallergic, “Spring Break Is an Oasis for Art Fair Haters,” Hrag Vartanian, March 2018
https://hyperallergic.com/431185/spring-break-2018/
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, “Stepping into Spring Before It Was Warm Outside,” Daryl King, May 2018
https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/before-it-was-warm-outside/3945
Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique includes digitally reconstructed panels from a French colonial wallpaper depicting Tahiti and Hawaii. I wanted to expose glitches, gaps, and mismatched layers to refer to tactics of appropriation and compositing used by Dufour et Cie in 1805 to construct this ideological image. Ten handbuilt figures surround the wallpaper on shelves, with glistening breadfruits piled below.
Photo: Zorawar Sidhu
Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, 2016
Ceramic, paint, wood, cardboard, inkjet on paper; 10 x 14 x 5 ft
Photo: Zorawar Sidhu
Botany is Ancestry, 2017
Concrete, copper, wood, ceramic, paint; approx. 2 x 12 x 14 ft
I rebuilt part of the foundation of my family’s home over the concrete floor of my New York studio. I wanted to align and acknowledge two very different worlds. This hybrid platform enabled me to ask how historical projects are literally brought home, how they can be actualized in my world and in the viewer’s presence. The ground floor of my home, including my bedroom, was constructed entirely from cinder blocks, from floor to ceiling. I know its texture from lying in bed as a child and tracing the edges of the painted cinder blocks with my fingers and feet. They are a visibly ubiquitous building material in tropical places: used to construct middle-class homes and housing projects, schools and warehouses, prisons and walls. I wanted to bring this material into my work because it alludes to territory, occupation, and economic gain in former colonies such as Hawaii. As a cheap, mass-produced construction material, it feels immediately of our own time, helping me to span the distance between historical events and present-day consequences. I positioned a copper-covered box at the corner of my studio as a point of alignment for domestic architecture and studio architecture. I positioned a second copper box at the intersection point of three cinder block walls, evoking the base of a column. I wanted the variegated patina effect created from salt, vinegar, torch, and sulfur to evoke old maps and geologic topographies. The copper boxes have a size and material presence that refer to luxury containers such as 18th century lacquered chests made to transport tea leaves from China to Europe.
Photo: Etienne Frossard
Uncertain Haven, 2019
Wood, acrylic paint, epoxy resin, air-dried clay, wire, stained glass, metal, 48 1/2 x 80 x 60 in.
Lesley Heller Gallery, Project Space, New York, NY, October 30 - December 21, 2019
Press:
Brooklyn Rail, “Rachelle Dang: Uncertain Haven” (Valentina Di Liscia, December 2019)
https://brooklynrail.org/2019/11/artseen/Rachelle-Dang-Uncertain-Haven
Over several years Rachelle Dang has reconstructed various 18th century botanical transport carriers based on scientific designs and historical illustrations. Her approach draws from her family’s history in Hawaii—herself born and raised there—and an acute awareness of environmental vulnerabilities and the lasting effects of colonialism. She intertwines ecological, colonial, and personal narratives embedded in these elaborate cabinets, which were originally produced to transport living tropical plant species across oceans to Europe and to other colonial territories.
In this new work, Dang has enlarged and subtly altered the transport carrier, sealing off the interior; its unknown contents behind three layers of wood and opaque stained glass. While the original form operated within a larger naturalist and colonial project to transfer living plant specimens globally, she has rendered the conveyor non-functional. The cabinet, stripped of its function, takes on a psychological resonance. Resembling a small house with its familiar A-frame structure, the form also alludes to a cage, trunk, or tomb. Dang’s use of color and its gradient application references an 18th century French watercolor drawing depicting the wooden carrier resting weightlessly over tufted pillows of grass—in a strange field extending to the milky horizon.
Leaf forms—brittle like porcelain—are caught between the glass panes and the boarded inner chamber of the carrier on one side. The cabinet structure has also been surrounded with an undulating floor of worn and misshapen cushions, hand-built in clay. These cushions—once supple markers of comfort and safety—are rendered rigid, their parched and cracked surfaces attest to strain and desiccation, evoking a barren topography. The carrier and its surrounding elements suggest an unsettling landscape of loss and displacement; of questionable protection or an Uncertain Haven.
rachelledang@gmail.com
instagram: @rachelledang.studio