The Domestic Plane: New Perspectives On Tabletop Art Objects

A meta-group exhibition in five chapters, organized by five curators, and including more than seventy artists, will feature tabletop art objects from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The experience could be likened to theatre, as viewers encounter objects that interact with each other, their audience, their setting, forging relationships to be examined and meanings to be discovered in their adventurous methods of display.

Objects Like Us explores the relational behavior of intimately scaled objects that personify or embody a human condition or attribute that transmits a performative potentiality, aura, or beingness.

Kitchen Arrangement, a site-specific commission, is a kitchen with interactive furniture and objects, such as seating, cabinetry, appliances, and lighting.

On Edge considers the table as territory: its inherent boundaries, and relationship with gravity.

Organized in the anyone-can-be-a-natural-philosopher spirit of the Age of Enlightenment, Almost Everything on the Table shows that with the right tools, you can hold infinity in the palm of your hand.

Seeking questions rather than answers, Handheld will chart artists’, designers’, and makers’ various responses to objects scaled to the hand.

The noted graphic novelist, illustrator, and animator, Richard McGuire, will be contributing an eight-page project to the exhibition publication consisting of sequential grids of 128 small line drawings depicting the interrelationship of a cast of small objects. Gathering My Things will bring a non-verbal interlude to the book, suggesting to the reader that common objects are pregnant with meaning and possibilities. McGuire will also be presenting an installation of new objects, The Way There and Back, in the Museum’s Screening Room.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.