Furniture by Architects and Sculpture at "T" Space

On view through August 23 | Rhinebeck, NY | Upstate Art Weekend special hours June 25–29, 11am–5pm

'T' Space presents "Furniture by Architects/Sculpture by Margaret Saliske" in its Archive Gallery, an exhibition that puts architect-designed furniture and objects into direct conversation with Saliske's small wall sculptures. The show is curated by Mark McDonald, co-founder of the influential mid-century design gallery Fifty/50 and one of the leading authorities on twentieth-century design, who has spent over four decades advising the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The furniture on display includes pieces by Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Rudolph Schindler, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Frank Gehry, Steven Holl and more. Among the works on view are Gehry's 1972 Easy Edges nesting table, made of corrugated cardboard and hardboard, and his 1990 High Sticking Chair in clear maple.

Saliske's small sculptures, made from materials like taskboard, acrylic, plaster, graphite, and aluminum, sit in the same conceptual territory as architectural models—speculative spaces that could be read as buildings, machine parts, or fragments lifted from nature. As Saliske puts it, the viewer brings their own experience to an abstract form to make sense of it; her job is to keep multiple readings suspended at once rather than resolve them into a single meaning. McDonald's curatorial point is that the relationship runs both ways — just as her sculptures can read as architecture, the architectural models and furniture in the show start to read as sculpture once they're placed in a gallery context.

Saliske, who moved to the Hudson Valley from New York City in 1989, holds a BA from Bennington College and studied in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program. She's had artist residencies in Seoul and at the American Academy in Rome, and has shown with Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson and Lockwood Gallery in Kingston, among others.

The Archive Gallery sits within the Steven Myron Holl Foundation Archive, and McDonald himself works out of the Hudson L-House, designed by Steven Holl Architects—meaning the whole enterprise, gallery included, is itself an example of architecture as a living, working space not just as museum diorama.

'T' Space, 60 Round Lake Rd., Rhinebeck, NY. Sundays 11am–5pm and by appointment; Upstate Art Weekend hours June 25–29, 11am–5pm.