Martha Rosler:
Irrespective

2018
The Jewish Museum, New York City
Cultural (Completed)
4,500 SF

An exhibition creating a spatial framework through which to organize thirty-plus years of Martha Rosler’s work—a range of media, rhetoric, and type.

The work itself is full of contradictions and transgressions, and in looking closely at the artist’s career, we understood the work as in dialogue both with the city and with larger cultural structures. The work acts to reshuffle the city and those structures, mostly through highlighting how they may be seen anew through different perspectives, collaging, and spatial layering.

We took these methods and applied them to the layout of the galleries, creating a diagonal wall grid off-set from the perimeter walls by 45 degrees. As visitors walked through the spaces they were always walking ‘against’ the grain of the museum itself, and the resultant galleries varied largely in size, character, and arrangement. This meant that each space was distinct, and that there was a sense of disorientation throughout the exhibition that resonated with the artist’s work through its slippages and overlaps.

Fabrication: South Side Design and Building
Photography (first image): Jason Mandella 
Photography (all others): Michael Vahrenwald/Esto

Press

Martha Rosler Isn’t Done Making Protest Art, The New York Times, November 2018.Reading Martha Rosler: Why Her Retrospective at the Jewish Museum is the Antidote to Our Post-Midterms Angst, Phaidon, November 2018.Tamed by time: Martha Rosler at the Jewish Museum, New York, The Financial Times, November 2018.