Foreign Objects is an exhibition of works by Robert Anderson, Laura Eldret, and Florian Roithmayr; artists that are interested in the material consequences of the physical body and its social interactions.

The exhibition includes videos, textiles and fabric-based sculptures by Laura Eldret that explore the rug-making traditions of a Zapotec community in Mexico. Amongst these is Portal on Día de Muertos, one of a series of large colourful weavings called ‘Receipts of Exchange’, co-designed by the artist and the craftspeople that she encountered during her research. In the film The Juicers, she explores how the interactions of the community become channeled through physical materials, colours, flavours, sounds, and sense of place. Eldret’s hanging fabric sculptures, titled Gateways, present the juice bag – a container of locally-produced fruit juice which is a recurring image in the video work – as a motif representing her collaboration with the weavers.

Robert Anderson creates sculptures and installations that unfold from the starting point of historical source images. The resulting works become an arrangement that he describes as an ‘image index’ or ‘tableau’ that bring together elements from a range of cultural references such as modernism and classicism, and often suggest the absent body and the architecture of display. In Foreign Objects, Anderson’s use of materials such as marble and velvet refer to the fleshy corporeality of a Roman sculpture of the flayed satyr Marsyas, and the funereal drapery of the catafalque structure that was used to support the casket of Abraham Lincoln, and has since been used to publicly present the dead bodies of some of the most distinguished US citizens.

Florian Roithmayr’s sculptural work embraces the unexpected consequences of one material being set in relation to another. A range of materials with competing properties (foam, clay, steel, concrete, paper) imprint themselves upon one another through processes of moulding, casting, dry-setting and gravitational contact. Among his works for Foreign Objects are sculptures that have been produced on-site at CCA over an 8-day period, which – like other works in the exhibition – carry the traces of human-object and inter-object exchange that has been shaped over time.