Anya Gallaccio: Beautiful Minds

A giant 3D clay printer, will occupy the entire gallery space and over the course of the exhibition be actively printing a scaled effigy of a mountain (to be precise Devil’s Tower, Wyoming). The machine, built by the artist in collaboration with a group of her recent graduates from UC San Diego, usurps recent advances in mechanical technology, subverting the very precise process of 3D printing by forcing the approximate and unreliable material of a slip clay thorough it.

Gallaccio’s subversion of this found mechanism reveals something of the obsolescence and fallibility of technology, often the failure of the clay to adhere to the rules of the machine bring unexpected and chaotic results. For Gallaccio, the printer’s extruded coils of wet clay (mimicking the fluid layering of geology) highlight the potential slippage in artistic intent, the limits of materials, and the struggle of communication.

Beautiful Minds is not only an auto-fabricating sculpture but a work that confuses the distinction between the object itself and the process of its manifestation.