American ceramicist Genesis Belanger has spent the last decade staging pastel-toned tableaux that turn ordinary domestic objects into something faintly unsettling. Her sculptures pair floating hands, eyes, and lips with markers of contemporary culture such as burgers, cigarettes, pills, and beauty products, fusing a surreal, feminist sensibility with Pop art conventions to critique American consumerism. That critical edge is sharpened by her own background: before turning to sculpture, she worked as a commercial prop stylist in the fashion industry, an experience that shows in how precisely her pieces mimic the polish of advertising while quietly undercutting it.
Belanger’s newest project, however, steps outside the living room entirely. Commissioned by Public Art Fund for City Hall Park in Manhattan, Heads or Tails scales her domestic vocabulary up to public monument size. A flock of pastel concrete birds gathers in a fountain, and potted plants sit on dollies as if mid-move, collapsing the distance between the artificial and the real in a public setting rather than a private one. Two cast-bronze figures reinterpret Lady Justice: instead of her traditional scales and blindfold, one figure holds up a mirror reflecting a sculpted face back at her, while the other raises her hands to uneven heights, reworking the symbol of impartiality into something more ambivalent.
What connects Belanger’s tabletop ceramics to this new public work is a consistent interest in contradiction: comfort sitting next to anxiety, order next to decay, chance next to control. The move into bronze and cast concrete does not soften that tension so much as put it in front of a wider public, outside gallery walls and inside a park pedestrians cross every day. Alongside the outdoor commission, New York audiences can currently see more of her studio-scale work in the group exhibition Touch Grass at Perrotin, which situates her ceramics within a broader current conversation about domestic life and material culture. Heads or Tails will be on view through November 15.
More info: Instagram (h/t: Colossal).
in Bahia.