AUDIENCE at MASS MoCA (building 6) through Nov 2025

Amy Podmore is propelled by an interest in surrealist strategies of transformation and the line between stillness and motion in sculpture.

In Audience, she offers enigmatic plaster casts of found wicker baskets and cornucopias. What we see as the exterior is actually the interior of these baskets, unfolding a vulnerable underbelly in the act of reversal. Podmore embeds motorized glass eyeballs into the woven warp and weft of the basket surfaces, still visible in the plaster translation. Defamiliarized, the molded baskets and their ranging, expressive forms adopt an almost anthropomorphic quality. As their eyes sleepily fall shut and whip open, the museum visitor becomes the one being uncannily watched back.

Exhibited in MASS MoCA’s Building Six, in the largest form Audience has taken to date, Podmore assumes implicit dialogue with Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), whose work is on view adjacent to her own and also features eyeballs. Generations apart, both artists nonetheless invoke whimsical forms and concepts of the gaze to consider the psychological uncanniness of the everyday.