Caitlin Masley at her studio in DUMBO. (Image: Carissa Pelleteri)

Looking at Baltimore’s busted-out vacancies last weekend, with their broken, boarded-up windows and exhausted dereliction, I couldn’t help but think of a phrase the artist Caitlin Masley used when we spoke in January: “monuments to failure.” It’s an interesting description, because monuments tend to valorize failure’s opposite: success and the heroic triumphs of civilization. Beyond recognizing fallen soldiers and epic battles, monuments reserve their monumentality for the great and the good. Yet so much of life is neither great nor good, and if reality is to be preserved in statuary, isn’t it equally worth capturing the sad defeats of life? And if we were to pursue that idea, would we need to go much farther than the half-built developments littering so much of America today? Aren’t their shells evidence of stock market failure and an inability to curb our greed for more land, more profit?

Those are the kinds of questions Masley’s artworks prompt. Her sculptures, drawings, installations, and photography speak to the hoped-for futures humans conjure and then leave behind, whether in their imaginations or here in the material world. There is, for instance, “TWOTOWERSVER2,” a manipulated photo of an imaginary landscape in postwar reconstruction, and “Copperland,” a series of abstract drawings overlaid in copper leafing. In the works, dense clusters of human habitation are seen from a bird’s-eye view, with some sections darkened as if erased, the whole of it suggesting a desert landscape—El Paso at night maybe, or, more likely, bombed villages in the Middle East. Continue Reading More »