There’s a work of art at the Henry Art Gallery I can’t stop thinking about. It’s a sheet of plastic—thick, construction-grade—suspended from the ceiling with all the pomp of a medieval tapestry hanging at the Met. It’s clear, but slightly milky in places where the translucence has turned mottled and hazy from use. Its polyethylene edges have been meticulously whipstitched with undyed white twine, the corners embellished with braided hemp tassels.
It’s part of Eric-Paul Riege’s solo exhibit, ojo|-|ólǫ́. Riege is a Diné artist from New Mexico who integrates traditional Native art forms like weaving, silversmithing, and beading into contemporary sculptural forms. Giant textile works resemble oversize jewelry, woven rugs, or big kinetic abstractions that gently spin and sway. Others share a quizzical resemblance to heavily ornamented cat towers, deconstructed punching bags, or fuzzy chandeliers. Many double as instruments, dripping with jangling metals, tassels, and beads. One of the first objects a person encounters is a small spray of metal jingle cones threaded onto a rope tied to a vent near the ceiling; air blasting from the museum’s HVAC system sends the thing twirling and tinkling.
After having it live rent-free in my head since March, I returned to ojo|-|ólǫ́ to see if the plastic holds up to the myth it had become in my mind. As I approached, I overheard one visitor ask another, “I think it’s a shower curtain?”
It’s actually packing material: a protective piece of plastic used by another museum to wrap another work during deinstallation. Riege has incorporated salvaged packing materials into their practice for years, a quiet jab at institutional systems. Its title is a delicious run-on thought: blankets have warmed us for a long time why not just keep making MORE Make a blanket for a blanket – they get cold 2.
Riege’s work operates on many levels: as an extension of Diné weaving traditions—Riege comes from a long line of weavers—and as a critique of the colonial institutions that collect and frame Native art. Riege also inhabits the role of trickster: rule-breaker, shape-shifter, and sacred fool, upturning and unsettling hierarchies of materials and expectations. To that end, none of the show labels identifies materials. Instead, a single placard lists every organic and synthetic substance used throughout the exhibition: blood (human, sheep), bone (elk, deer), dye (cedar, coffee, juniper, tea), glass, ink, leather, paper, tin, nickel, silver, tobacco, wax, wood, and so forth.
Set free, materials become the ingredients for a kind of self-mythologizing central to Riege’s practice. Across exhibitions, Riege has woven the story of Hólǫ́—an alter ego, son, collaborator, and imagined future ancestor—through sculptures, videos, and the transformed scraps of everyday life. Many of the sculptures are designed to be worn. During performances, Riege dons and activates them, granting the objects an uncanny animation and agency of their own.
Riege’s work is anything but didactic—a playfulness prevails—but there’s a quiet murmuring throughout: that the sacred can be found in the ordinary.
The act of reenchantment echoes through another exhibition recently unveiled at the Henry, Day-to-Day: Rhythm, Routine, Resistance,a survey of contemporary artists exploring the poetics and politics of everyday life.
The exhibition feels important at a time when the domination of digital spectacle has dulled our ability to be present in the material world. Many of the artists featured in the exhibit are Gen X and older—the last generations to remember life before the internet. Their works point back to a way of navigating the world of objects with slowness and awe.
The show opens with one of Isaac Layman’s macro photographs of the most banal of banals: a white plastic ice-cube tray against a white background. Yet the image is a digital composite of 26 separate photographs blown up so large the detail surpasses anything the naked eye can see. The ice is not clear at all, but crystalline galaxies roiling with bubbles and spotted with flecks of dirt as bright as stardust.
Many works, though quiet, contain entire universes. Dawn Clements’s 78-foot drawing Middlebury spans two walls, constructing a dizzying panoramic record of a single room she occupied during a residency in Vermont. Rashid Johnson’s video Black and Blue follows the artist through an ordinary day during the COVID-19 pandemic, lingering over moments by turns melancholic, boring, and sublime.
The exhibition’s power lies in such subtle gestures. On a plinth in the center of the room, two broken chairs briefly become the most compelling objects in the universe. One, Louise Nevelson’s Throne, presents the fragment of a destroyed chair framed in a shallow shadow box. A smudged clump of bright peacock-blue paint across the seat back shimmers with the luminosity of gold leaf on a medieval manuscript. It’s an unmistakable American Beauty moment—the plastic bag dancing in the wind—but such sweet, jarring epiphanies recur over and over throughout the exhibition.
Nearby, a delicate wooden dandelion carved by Dan Webb rises from a block of redwood. Every part—the rosette of leaves, twin stems, flower heads, even the taproot emerging through the charred base—is carved from a single piece of wood. Upon leaving, I find dandelions following me everywhere. They cluster along the sidewalks and push upward into the present moment. Somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten how to see them.
See Eric-Paul Riege:ojo|-|ólǫ́ through Oct 25, and Day-to-Day: Rhythm, Routine,
Resistance through Jan 3, 2027 at the Henry.