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ish racks and ice cube trays,bathroom shelving and rentalchairs, trashcans and feed con-tainers, park benches and baby

seats, pet food bowls and ball chains:Nancy Lupo gives inordinate aesthetic at-tention and meticulous, nearly medicalcare to such overlooked, ubiquitous, andbanal goods mass-produced for the janito-rial and domestic realms that crowd theperiphery of everyday life. A trip to AceHardware or Bed Bath & Beyond starts usoff in the right direction. Lupo’s growingcast of ready-made, industrial products iseconomical, utilitarian, clinical, and deba-sed. She negotiates the artificial mutabilityof plastic, silicone, rubber, foam, wire, andmetal. Workaday hardness grounds hervernacular in emblems of manufactureddurability, standardized things engineeredto be both cheap and take lots of abuse,like recycling bins and heavy duty dogchew toys. Such promises of indestructibi-lity are a real tease – they beg to be pro-bed and melted, if not broken entirely.

In Parent and Parroting (2016), her room-size sculpture presented earlier this yearat the Swiss Institute in New York, storagesolutions become display strategies.Twenty-eight under-the-sink bathroomracks were covered in Magic Sculpt epoxyclay, encrusted with kitty litter, lined up inthree groups, and stacked two high in a U-shaped configuration that the viewer ente-red like an exploded cage or skeletalmonster jaw. Emaciated but fleshy like aGiacometti, the putty-slathered structuresseem bombed out and archaeological.Tight rows of white folding chairs facing inat the open end established a theatricalorientation. The jawbone arc gets echoed

in the tooth-like shape of each curvingrack. Orality is central across Lupo’s prac-tice. The racks were intricately interwovenwith spools of dental floss and tied toge-ther simply with white twisty ties, kind oflike mock braces. Surfaces are characteri-stically gummy and studded with crud.Choice foreign objects inserted into thearmature and on the shelves look likefood caught between giant teeth: oranges,melons, stress balls, chocolate, Nylabones,rubber hands-free baby bottle holders,and a wooden spindle. The list of mate-rials is prodigious and partly perishable,requiring selective replenishment over thecourse of the exhibition. Caretaking isbuilt into her sculptural propositions as anextension of the laborious, cosmetic treat-ment of things in her studio.

Even with the marked sense of spaciou-sness that the artist retains across thisand other installations, the specter of ma-terial excess and consumer waste creepsin through the repetition of identical units,foodstuffs, and a fondness for space-sa-ving organizational systems. The waythings fit together or are mutually embed-ded is a matter of efficiencies as well assexuality. This ball gags that hole, this fin-ger wants to plug that dike, this lemongoes right in that sucker – such satisfac-tions are visceral, guttural, pre-lingual, anddopamine-rich. Stackability is prized for itspracticality and the implication of otherkinds of nesting, spooning, and linkage.Accumulation produces long chains ofprefab modules strung up like beads –pictures of perverse profusion. Additiveconstruction of like-parts forms new ana-tomies, each segment a bone in a skele-ton. Elsewhere, stout masses cluster

NANCY LUPOby Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

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together in a concrete clearing like a miniStonehenge. Quantities track an attentionto relative scale: thousands of grains ofblack and white quinoa versus hundredsof real and fake cherries versus dozens ofrolls of toilet paper versus nine red tra-shcans and five tumbling Bumbo babyseats versus twinned Parmesan rounds.Miniaturization in the form of small feedcontainers, little pieces of plastic sushi,pennies, or pet clothing, is knowingly non-threatening and adorable. I am pulled in,laughing at the same time that I recoilfrom the lumpen pudginess and encrustedbulbosity of a Henry Moore-shaped nuggetor a vocal pair of The Woofer dog coatssuspended in matching blue recycling re-ceptacles. Absurdity and hilarity are pre-sent everywhere in degrees of repression.

Rubbermaid Brute containers are also pre-sent everywhere, common (in this country)to the point of near-invisibility. Iconic indu-strial design is so platonic, it’s taken forgranted. Making their blunt familiaritystrange again, Lupo uses Brutes in a rangeof sizes, measuring volume and heft in,say, 10, 20, or 55-gallon containers. Lined,empty, or filled variously (one with ice, ano-ther with cabbage heads slowly rotting inwater), their evident capacity stands in re-lation to my body’s own fluid contents andaqueous composition. But beyond theirbulk, they also figure sonically becauseLupo sculpts with sound and syllable aswell: “Rubbermaid” and “Brute” are keywords with bouncy, rude attitude, while“Parent” and “Parroting” make for a thicktitle that fills the mouth with lots to chewon. She has a keen ear for the corporatepoetry of brand and product names –“Bumbo,” “Magic Smooth,” “FEED-SEED” –and studies the way words contort muscleand bone when pronounced. Mouthfeelguides this sculptor’s hand like anothereye, another brain, another intelligence.Sucking, salivating, and thirsting, themouth is an originary site of animal instinctand desire that frames her larger fascina-tion with gut impulses, intuitions, appetites,

metabolisms, and psychology – the myste-ries of subjectivity that are determined bythe body’s biochemical ecosystem.

The Lupian object world is not quite dysto-pic but definitely uncanny, disturbing, anda bit giddy. In genre movie terms, I mightpitch it as 2001: A Space Odyssey meetsMad Max meets Death Becomes Her witha dash of Porky’s. Sometimes the overalleffect conjures a denatured future in whichorganic and inorganic matter have mor-phed and merged beyond easy recogni-tion. Her range of materials generatesdoubt around whether substances arefood or not, edible or not, toxic or not, rot-ten or not. Surfaces coated in Soylent, chiaseeds, nutritional yeast, and SwheatScoop kitty litter produce powerfully abjecttextures. Anti-spectacular and strategicallyantiseptic, her objects luxuriate in thecolor and feel of dried sludge – a pasteuri-zed and muddy mucosal mixture of appro-ximate skin tones that evokes prosthetics,mannequins, Band-Aids, make-up, andvomit. Her future-flesh palette of highlyopaque neutral grays, beiges, and brownsmasterfully exploits the pre-existing colorscheme of white cube architecture andserves as the perfect foil for intensely sa-turated, graphic punctuations of bright tan-gerines, Eureka yellows, Babybel reds, andsalmon sashimi pinks worthy of JessicaStockholder.

Color punches mightily through an other-wise pallid landscape the way commodity-sized holes riddle the tough plastic skin ofher Brute bins: modeling porosity on manylevels, Lupo multiplies openings and facili-tates release. Leaky, perforated vesselsthat can’t hold much water undercut anabiding attraction to bone-like solidity withthe greater need for permeability and cir-culation, flow and crosscurrent, penetra-tion and puncture. Bodies break down intopervious membranes because we finallyunderstand how chemically receptive, ab-sorptive, and mutually enmeshed we are inour contaminated environment.

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