ghosts, The Phillip's Collection

“We are thrilled to have the innovative Marley Dawson create these kinetic pieces that engage so whimsically with the museum space and artwork. As part of our centennial celebration this Intersections project continues to forge new connections between then and now, and reimagine the history of the Phillips in the present,” says Dr. Vesela Sretenović, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

“The theme of Dawson’s work connects to our centennial year, as we reflect on the Phillips’s past and plan a new way forward,” explains Vradenburg Director and CEO Dorothy Kosinski. “This multifaceted collaboration also suits our dedication to founder Duncan Phillips’s values by connecting with our local community and engaging with our globalized world.”

Inspired by the dramatic architecture of the Phillips’s Goh Annex stairway, Dawson produces two groups of kinetic sculptures that accentuate its spiral configuration. In the first group—comprised of five chairs made in brass and suspended from the dome at different heights and rotating at different axis points—the artist creates a dialogue with both the stairway railing and the Phillips’s early Modernist-Arts-and-Crafts-style chairs. While the shape and size of Dawson’s chairs mirrors the Phillips chairs, the brass he uses is the same as the brass used for the railing. Whereas the museum’s chairs are heavy and sturdy, Dawson’s are weightless and almost translucent; they function like ethereal ghosts of actual objects.

Dawson’s other piece—a wall mounted sculpture consisting of hundreds of brass rods hung on a machined brass track and assembled to allow movement—converses with Morris Louis’s painting Number 182. The sculpture is scaled to two thirds, which is precisely Dawson’s height, and the rods are arranged in various patterns to achieve the striped finish of the original painting. A small motor attached to the work oscillates the rods to give them a sway and hum that echo the shimmering radiance of Louis’s painting.

Much like with his hanging chairs, Dawson reverses immaterial with material, shifting the liquidy stripes of Louis’s painting into a solid sculptural mass. Entitled ghosts, the project reimagines the history of the museum in the present.