Harvard exhibit reveals ‘the spirit’ within everyday objects
Contemporary sculptor, printer, and visual artist Willie Cole’s haunting works blend the familiar with the unexpected. Now that striking creative tension is on view at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in “Willie Cole: Beauties.” The exhibit, on display in Byerly Hall’s Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, features a series of prints made from ironing boards that have been crushed, hammered, flattened until they’re a few millimeters thick, covered with ink, and used as plates on a printing press. The ghostly silhouettes shift perceptions and challenge assumptions with their suggestion of the ethereal and the everyday. “My interest or my habit is to work with objects that have had intimate contact with human beings,” Cole said during a talk prior to the show’s official opening this week. “The things you touch hold onto a part of you. My interest then is to extract and reveal the spirit in any object I use.” Like so much...