Red Giant is pleased to present Minor Monuments, a group exhibition of new work by five sculptors working in stone: Candice Russell, Sebastian Martorana, Louis Sarowsky, Stephen Shaheen, and Paul Tucci. The exhibition takes up the oldest promise of the material, permanence, and asks what happens when it is offered to subjects the monument has always left out.
Stone is the material we reach for when we want to insist that something will not be forgotten: the founder on his plinth, the general on his horse, the name cut into the face of the tomb. Marble and its relatives carry that history into any room they enter, and the hierarchy that comes with it. Some subjects have long been thought worthy of the permanent, and most have not. A monument is, among other things, a decision about what deserves to last, and for most of the history of carved stone that decision has run in one direction: toward power, piety, and death.
Minor Monuments gathers artists who accept the full weight of the material and aim it somewhere else. In their hands marble is granted to a pillow, a snack, a childhood puppet, a doubt, a body that will not compose itself into an ideal. A dozen donuts are carved in stone and boxed by the dozen. Onyx is hung from a length of found chain. The classical vocabulary of the nude and the allegory is invoked and then allowed to sag, sprout, and misbehave. What unites the work is not a subject but a gesture: the deliberate spending of many hundred hours, and several hundred million years of geological time, on things a monument would never stoop to commemorate.
To render a toaster pastry or a television friendship in marble is a joke that takes itself seriously, an argument that the fleeting and the ordinary have as much claim to permanence as any battle or founder. The gesture is not a rejection of the monumental tradition so much as a quarrel with its guest list. It proposes that the tradition was never wrong about the power of stone, only selective about who and what got to receive it.