Since the early 1990s American artist Rachel Harrison has been developing a brand of unwieldy, unyielding sculpture, sometimes abject and sometimes abrasive in its refusal to give up meaning. Objects from the catch-all drawer--a clown nose, a syringe, a framed photograph, a houseplant--are deposited on built agglomerations of polystyrene and cement, giving individual works the pugnacious air of a bad joke, sometimes emphasized by a title (like 2006’s Nice Rack). A dolly or stool or table or ladder, thickly encrusted or as good as new, lends most works a strong sense of autonomy, but never resolution. Using elements fundamental to sculpture--the way an object requires us to walk around it, the way we try to make sense out of two different things juxtaposed--her works lead us towards one understanding and then makes us question it as we turn the corner. They leave you with your interpretive tools blunted, even as they hint at portraiture. Sometimes Harrison picks up a camera. In 2000, she took a series of photos of a window in Perth Amboy, NJ, where a vision of the Virgin Mary had appeared in the glass. Pilgrims tended to press a hand against the pane, as if the sense of touch were better equipped to pick up a trace of the event. These photographs, unexpectedly representing unfiltered human desire, were part of a maze-like installation of corrugated cardboard with objects. Selected working prints from a new photo series now on view in New York titled “The Voyage of the Beagle,” will be on hand at the Center as part of Harrison’s visit. Please come early to take a look. Johanna Burton is a critic and art historian who, among other projects, recently edited a collection of essays on photographer Cindy Sherman and is writing on painter Mary Heilmann for an upcoming retrospective. On March 7, Harrison and Burton will discuss all facets of Harrison’s work. They’ll also be discussing feminism. + Since graduating from Wesleyan University in 1989 with a B.A. in Fine Art, Rachel Harrison has been living and working in New York. Harrison has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Migros Museum (Zurich, 2007) and has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, 2004), The Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee, 2002) as well as at Greene Naftali Gallery, New York, Galerie Christian Nagel, Köln, and Transmission Gallery, Glasgow. Her work has been included in Of Mice and Men, The 4th Berlin Biennial (Berlin, 2006), The Carnegie International (Pittsburgh, 2004), The Venice Biennale (Venice, 2003), the Whitney Biennial (New York, 2002) as well as exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (2004, 1997), PS1 Contemporary Art Center (2002, 2000, 1998), and the Museum of Modern Art (2001, 1998). She has also taught at Cooper Union, Columbia, and the Bard MFA program. + New York-based art historian and critic Johanna Burton is the editor of Cindy Sherman (2006), a collection of critical essays on the artist for MIT Press’s October Files series. Most recently the author of an article on the women-only art magazine Eau de Cologne, published in Witness to Her Art (eds. Rhea Anastas and Michael Brenson, Center for Curatorial Studies, 2006), Burton is writing a catalogue essay for Mel Bochner’s survey show at the Art Institute of Chicago, which closes January 7, and another on Mary Heilmann, for the artist’s retrospective at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California, this summer. A faculty member of Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, she was a critical issues fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program and is presently writing her dissertation at Princeton University on appropriation in American art of the 1980s.