SPRING 2023

ALEX SCHWEDER / CAITLIN MACBRIDE

+ Family Matters featuring new paintings and sculptures by Elliott +Henry + Harris Earls, in Wasserman Works.

March 18th – June 3rd, 2023

OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, March 18th, 5-7PM

Wasserman Projects is pleased to present two solo exhibitions in the main galleries featuring NYC based performance architect, Alex Schweder and Hudson, NY based painter, Caitlin MacBride. Both artists’ breathe life into the anthropomorphic characters they have created and depicted in their works.

Alex Schweder’s The Third Thing blossoms sensuality and sound into March’s volatile middle. Describing the experience of this inflatable installation as an effervescent cocktail of skin, sound, mirror, fur, and milk, Schweder hints that the taste for drinking this work is not acquired in polite society. Swelling and sagging, animated by the fill and empty of air, this experience at Wasserman Projects pursues his recent discovery that the inflatable architecture he has made for over a decade can be newly approached as sound-producing instruments. Opening this possibility wider, Schweder has commissioned an eclectic group of sound artists to form an unlikely ensemble. Projects collaborators: Nick Dunston (New York, bassist/composer), Frank Bretschneider (Berlin, electronic musician), Geneva Skeen (Pittsburgh, sound artist), Anonymous (vocals).

The Third Thing builds from Schweder´s previous collaboration with Wasserman Projects The Sound And The Future in 2016. As a new Detroit premiere, the exhibition explores the artist and gallerys’ ongoing interest in merging digital and analog media toward artistic expression.

The Third Thing was made possible by a prestigious grant from The Pollock-Krasner and Brian Wall Foundations awarded to Schweder for the exceptional quality of his artistic activities in 2021.

Caitlin MacBride’s featured body of work focuses on the design and craftsmanship of The Shakers, an early American utopian religious community. In the autumn of 2018 MacBride lived as a resident artist at the first Shaker settlement in the United States, studying their inventions, furniture, and interior design. She’d become interested in their designs while reading the Shaker manifesto for object making, which emphasizes that every object should be both useful and beautiful. Her recent paintings honor these handmade American designs that were integral to the development of the modernist movement. On a personal level, these intimately painted studies of furniture and tools helped her reconcile the upbringing she’d had in a religious working-class community with her current identity as an artist and member of many contemporary arts communities. She has recently returned to studying early colonial furniture and tools in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection. Researching the history of objects and how they find their way to prominence in museums, offers an enlightening view into the hierarchical structures of visual culture.

“Family Matters” – An Earls Family Collaboration opens in Wasserman Works in conjunction with Schweder and MacBride. Featuring Elliott Earls (2D Design, Artist-in-Residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art) and his sons Henry (20 years old studying contemporary art and design at The Cooper Union in New York) and Harris (15 years old, an oil painter studying at Cranbrook Kingswood). All works will be available for purchase via Wasserman Works March 18th!

All three exhibitions will remain on view through June 3, 2023.