Richard McGuire:The Way There and Back

​The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to debut two projects by Richard McGuire, The Way There and Back, a site-specific installation of all new objects, and My Things, a specially commissioned book project to be published in Fall 2018. 

The Way There and Back presents an installation of just over a hundred objects, each one an abstracted sculptural evocation of a shoe. Each object, made of wood, plaster, or aqua resin, evokes a specific fashion, desire, functionality, and personality—high heels, loafers, disco-era platforms, sandals, and sneakers, all corresponding with McGuire’s personal long-standing conversation with New York City’s culture and history. The objects will be staged along a shelf of varying depth around the perimeter of the Museum’s Screening Room and circle the gallery in a way that imparts a time-line installation. Mimicking the cacophony of the street—the uniformity of waiting lines, the glamour of the runway, and the theatricality of the stage—viewers are surrounded by a parade of objects that together form charismatic tableaux. McGuire’s many influences include Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum/RayGun Wing, Philip Guston’s paintings of cartoonish shoe piles, and Giorgio Morandi’s jars and bottles.

My Things depicts the complex interrelationship of a cast of small objects encountered by McGuire in a single day, presented in sequential grids of small line drawings. 

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.