For artist Elizabeth Alexander, beauty is a tool for subverting domestic order.
Her new exhibition at K Contemporary is, no doubt, lovely to look at. The objects on display, all referencing home decor, unfold in lush, floral wallpaper patterns, delicate dinner ware, refined furniture pieces.
Elizabeth Alexander alters plates and cups to spotlight the way domestic items reinforce ideas of class in the U.S. (Provided by K Contemporary)
Like many of the highly-tuned exhibits K Contemporary produces, Alexander’s “The Good Ones” is a fully immersive experience. This is not just a show, it is a 360-degree, walk-through environment that transforms the gallery into sumptuous dreamscape. Entering the space, a visitor feels as if they have been invited to a fancy dinner party at a tasteful mansion in a suitably high-end neighborhood.
Closer inspection reveals something different though. The porcelain teacups have suspicious holes in them, the plates are scraped and tattered. The rugs and chandeliers are made entirely of paper; it is not real at all, it is a front. As hard as this host has tried to make a perfect abode, there are cracks, tears, chips and dust.
And so it goes in many homes — things are not always as they appear, particularly when company shows up. Refinement is a reflection of our ambitions for perfection and status. It obscures the trauma and the transgressions, and hides the truth. Alexander wants us to reckon with things beneath the surface.
Her method here, in fact, is to attack surfaces, and she does so with an almost incredulous amount of human labor. She takes elaborate floral wallpaper and cuts out each flower by hand, thousands and thousand of them, deconstructing the original prints and putting them back together on her own terms.
She takes fine porcelain cups and saucers, decorated with intricate, colorful details, and then meticulously removes those details using a small drill. What remains are the skeletons of the vessels — they still look like cups and saucers, but they now have holes and breaks in them. They have lost their function and their finesse.
This, too, is very precarious work. Alexander does it by submerging the objects in water and using a cordless dremel to etch out their markings. She has to remove just enough detail without breaking the fragile wares.
She is then free to rearrange them in a less-then-perfect order — into place settings that reveal their imperfections, into lighting fixtures that, while also sort of exquisite, show a raggedy wear-and-tear.
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The exhibit is, according to the accompanying literature, biographical. Alexander’s work is a product of her own “loving yet tumultuous working-class upbringing.” This show does, indeed, feel personal. We all have our individual ways of setting up the furniture, accessories and art we choose for our homes. Every object in “The Good Ones” is deliberately placed in relation to the next, according to her personal preferences.
But it also feels familiar, similar to any home we might live in or visit, because every middle-class house has the same goods in one form or another. And, it becomes clear as you contemplate the imperfections and nonsensical reconstructions on display, every home has isecrets that it does not show to the rest of world. Instead, we try to look admirable, to impress outsiders. The show’s title refers to “the fancy dinnerware reserved for guests often called ‘the good china.’”
That said, Alexander does have some history not everyone shares and that is also on display in the show. Along one of the gallery’s walls, hang pieces that come from an ongoing series of works she started in 2021, titled “A Mightier Work is Ahead.”
The back story goes something like this: Alexander was in an antique store and came across a set of finely-crafted porcelain plates. As she inspected them, she realized they all featured scenes from the South and commemorated the acts of the Confederacy — military parades, soldiers on horseback heading off to battle. She acquired them and set about altering them to tell a different story than the one that has come to be associated with shameful acts of bigotry and exploitation.
Once again she took her labor underwater, using her drilling tool to remove the human presence in the scenes. She etched out the warriors, their weapons and their steeds leaving only their silhouettes. She left visible the backgrounds which featured images of nature and urban architecture.
The core of this work is a recycled brass sconce. Many of the pieces in the exhibit were made just this year. (Provided by K Contemporary)
As she was doing the project, some personal research lead her to the knowledge that her own ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. The project became an act of personal reckoning.
As a recognition of the lasting trauma of immoral acts, Alexander dried and kept all of the dust that was produced from each of her etchings. The dust is captured in clear glass vials that hang beneath the plates, which are installed in a perfect line at eye height.
Both the plate series and the newer pieces reconstructing domestic objects work toward the same goal: getting beneath the polish in order to tell more complex story about the social order. “The Good Ones” is a complex effort in every way.
But it starts, and ends, with a reverence for beauty — our attraction to it, how we use it for both bad and good, how it allows us to tell our stories, and then to tell them again, moving closer to truth as history, in both broad and intimate ways, evolves.
IF YOU GO
“The Good Ones” continues through Sept. 14 at K Contemporary, 1412 Wazee St. It’s free. Info: 303-590-9800 or kcontemporaryart.com.