“Found,” which opened January 29 at Connecticut’s Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, is a six-month-long series by in-house curator Richard Klein that explores how discarded objects can be re-imagined and re-appropriated into items of real, objective value. The six artists with work on view include Brazilian-born sculptor Barrão and Seattle-based furniture maker Roy McMakin, both avid collectors of so-called junk who incorporate autobiographical details into their personal retrospectives.

Barrão, “Classificados,” 2011.

For his first U.S. solo exhibition, entitled “Mashups,” Barrão has fused fragmented pieces of clay objects, vitreous porcelains, and decorative ornaments once commonly found in the middle-class homes of his native Rio de Janerio into sculptural conglomerations. The artist obsessively scouts second-hand stores, street vendors, flea markets, auction houses, and dumpsters in search of bizarre tchotchkes and kitsch talismans, then organizes them into categories according to size and color, or whether they’re good luck charms (Buddhas, Brazilian figs, frogs, elephants, and the like). After his careful taxonomy, Barrão establishes a starting point and then melts and molds each object together, layer by layer. Barrão’s process “incorporates contradictions into a flexible structure,” says Klein. “It’s one that encourages constant transformation from the outside in and from the inside out.”    

Roy McMakin, “A rocking chair (that never had a seat) I painted blue when I was sixteen,” 2011.

McMakin’s pieces are less cacophonous; he draws on his own massive collection of used furniture, inserting subtle quirks and asymmetries into each piece’s otherwise geometric form. For Found, McMakin modified eight items—including a Stickley desk, a slat-back rocking chair, and a 1920’s colonial bed—that he either bought as a young man or inherited after his parents’ deaths. The title of the show, “Middle,” speaks both to McMakin’s status as the middle of three children and to his decision to target the center of each object for his latest series of interventions.

Roy McMakin, “The bed I bought when I was a teenager that was later put in the creepy (maybe haunted) room in my parents’ basement where I had to sleep until Mike refused” (detail), 2011.

For McMakin, the work is an attempt to revisit and immortalize objects that have personal meaning to him. “It might seem counterintuitive that radically altering something could act to preserve it,” says Klein. “What’s being preserved in this case is not each piece of furniture’s outward form, but its emotional reality in the context of a human life.” One such diaristic piece is McMakin’s childhood desk (entitled The first piece of furniture I bought), which he’s bisected by extracting a one-inch-thick slice of wood from its profile. “This type of stealthy detail plants a notion in the mind of the viewer, 'Something’s wrong, I need to look.’” Although this structural “wrongness” can be polarizing at first, both Barrão and McMakin have succeeded in upholding the memory of their objects, if not the designs themselves.

Title image: “The first piece of furniture I bought (which was painted red when I found it)” detail, 2011.
Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
Roy McMakin
Barrão