The sculptures in Anissa Mack’s exhibition, Second, often begin with a memory of a thing in the world. Through a series of material substitutions and displacements, these memories (as sculpture) are recalled with increasing distortion and relevance to a present; memory is continually reinvented. Remaking and redoubling forms both quotidian and from within her work, Mack destabilizes the original and the role of these multiplied things in the world.

Doppelgangers to their referents, the doubles exist not only as copies, but discrete objects that complicate their firsts in unsettling, uncanny ways. Twinning becomes an act of duplicity, allowing the object to exist in multiple places simultaneously within different points of reference, inserting itself further into the everyday in strange fabrications. And yet, many of the forms in the work are derived from things that are themselves multiple (quilts, masks, laundry baskets, cross stitch samplers). Here the specifics of personal experience attenuate into more universal symmetries and patterns, and are realized in mysteriously coherent new wholes with their own inherent logic and emotion.

With affinity to both craft and outsider art traditions as well as the austere forms of Minimalism, Mack’s work is without a politicized agenda; it is intended as a direct form of communication. Free from overt art historical posturing, but with an acute acknowledgement of diverse and weird influences, Mack’s sculptures seem to exist as discrete things within a world of strange things; a parallel vernacular.

Anissa Mack has been included in numerous museum exhibitions including group exhibitions at the CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France (2010); ICA Philadelphia (2010); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (2003 and 2002); and solo exhibitions at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR (2010); Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, CA (2008); and a public commission for the Public Art Fund, NY (2002). Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, Time Out New York and The Guardian (London, UK). This is her second solo exhibition at the gallery.