Slip of the Tongue, 2015
- Medium
- Rubber, epoxy resin, polystyrene, concrete, paint, and aluminum and glass vitrine
- Dimensions
- 111 7/16 × 82 5/16 × 24 7/16 in. (283.05 × 209.07 × 62.07 cm)
- Accession Number
- 2022.32
- Credit
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Purchase with funds provided by the Acquisition and Collection Committee and Kathi and Gary Cypres in honor of Johanna Burton
Baghramian’s elusive and poetically open-ended work plays on the classical conventions of sculpture by moving promiscuously between references to architecture and the human body. Slip of the Tongue consists of four irregular resin objects positioned inside and around a museum-style glass vitrine. These biomorphic forms suggest limbs, thumbs, tongues, torsos, or other human body parts and exist somewhere between representation and abstraction. Their vitrine container, a hallmark of museum display, seems to allude to classification as well as its inadequacy. Too large, gawky, and bulbous to “fit” within the confines of the glass case, the resin objects become a stand-in for the artist and her audience alike: “slipping” out, “misspeaking,” or evading conventional institutional relationships of bodies to spaces.
