LINCOLN, MASS.- This spring, deCordova presents Sculpting with Air: Ian McMahon and Jong Oh, featuring site-specific installations by two contemporary sculptors who use different methods and materials to engage with the intangible material: air.

Ian McMahon creates voluminous, pillow-like forms using an innovative technique of sprayed plaster. Jong Oh fashions almost imperceptible structures with string, wire, and Plexiglas. While McMahon emphasizes materiality, solidity, and containment, Oh focuses on transparency, lightness, and expansiveness. Despite their contrasts, the two sculptors’ work is complementary. Both reshape space by exploring tension, balance, and force. They challenge our perceptions of gravity and perspective by creating forms that expand in the galleries

“In Sculpting with Air we’re bringing two boundary-pushing artists together to ask the question: What happens when sculptors choose emptiness, transparency, and weightlessness instead of solidity, density, or weight?” says Martina Tanga, deCordova’s Koch Curatorial Fellow. “We’re excited to see the result once the process-driven, site-specific, and temporary sculptures are installed in our galleries.”

Ian McMahon
Exploring volume, materiality, and tension, McMahon has invented an entirely new way of sculpting with air and plaster. His process involves inflating paper-thin plastic molds into which he sprays gypsum plaster, creating enormous, seemingly soft, pillow-like forms contained within a metal corral (pictured above). Air is an essential material for McMahon’s method, as it determines the shape of his sculptures, propels the plaster particles onto the molds, and acts as a drying agent for the plaster. Resulting forms confound the viewer’s expectations; the oversize cushions appear plush and full, but are actually hard and hollow, like an egg shell.

This site-specific work, created specifically for deCordova, is called Tether, relating to the physical connection the artwork has to the space; it can only be made on site and cannot be moved without being destroyed. Additionally, the title accounts for how the materials behave towards each other as the metal pipes restrain and pinch the air-filled, bulging plaster forms. Over 65 feet long and 25 feet wide, this is McMahon’s largest and most complex sculpture to date. While it towers over the viewer in certain places, there are also curves and nooks to the structure for more intimate encounters. The work’s enormous size cannot be grasped as a whole at once, but can be discovered slowly, as the viewer walks around it.

Jong Oh
Since 2012, Jong Oh has been creating geometric sculptures suspended in space. Hanging from the ceiling or extending from the walls, his delicate structures delineate and cut through the air in a gravity-defying feat (pictured right). He configures simple materials—fishing wire, Plexiglas, wooden and metal rods, painted threads—using a system of weights and anchors held in a carefully orchestrated balance. Responding to the architecture of the room, Oh’s compositions are conceived and crafted on site, making each work unique. Experience of the piece involves slow looking, giving our senses time to perceive the subtle shapes. Seen from different vantage points, forms will shift, appearing full from one angle and barely visible from another.

At deCordova, Oh’s installation weaves between two adjoining galleries, extending from one room into the other.