The title of Nairy Baghramian’s “Jupon de Corps”—an institutional survey that features works made between 2014 and 2021—is the French term for petticoat. The exhibition text states that the garment evokes “the idea of a layer—therefore a border,” which “signifies both intimacy and privacy.” As I wandered the show, a docent told me that a jupon was also a decorated item frequently worn by medieval knights, either alone or over chain-mail shirts, because it was as thick and as durable as armor. Indeed, Baghramian’s conceptual irony sits in the tension between fioritura and fortification.
Two sculptural assemblages, Maintainers B and Maintainers D, both 2018, dominate the first room of the show. Comprising thin aluminum plates and brightly colored, organic blobs of wax—some of which are held together with rickety cork-lined metal braces—they look strangely unfinished, like examples of process art arrested halfway through. They offer the viewer not only a sense of absence, but also a promise of what’s to come.
B 75, BH, Mod. NB, Ref. CO, MM, 2012, is a playful send-up of Claes Oldenburg’s posthumous tribute to Marilyn Monroe, the sculpture Ghost Wardrobe (for M.M.), 1967. Baghramian’s wall-based work, constructed from steel, concrete, plaster, cotton thread, and rubber, resembles a pair of oversized bras. Affixed to it is a tag with the letters “REF: CO” printed on it—a reference to the Pop sculptor, and Baghramian’s homage to an homage. Headgear, 2016, is a sculpture that’s been precipitously hung from the ceiling of a stairwell. The work feels like a Cronenbergian wind chime. Again, in both pieces, we feel what’s absent: Monroe’s famously exceptional breasts, a teenager’s crooked teeth being forced into impeccable alignment. We are given the trappings, the apparatuses that promise perfection—a promise that Baghramian gleefully breaks throughout this presentation.
— Sommer Browning