With its windows shattered, seeming cadavers arranged for examination and a glittering space rover settled atop a collapsed wall, Ramiken Crucible appeared to be the excavation site for some distant disaster. In fact it was the venue for Andra Ursuţa’s third solo show in New York, Magical Terrorism. The Romanian-born, New York-based sculptor succeeded in dislocating the already hard-to-find Lower East Side gallery, laying bare its structure and opening it to its surroundings even as she projected it into another time and place altogether.
Consider the achievement an act of “conversion,” a term Ursuţa taps for its semantic suppleness with her Conversion Tables (all works 2012). The series comprises eight sculptures of female torsos, five of which wear elaborate necklaces crafted from fabrics traditionally used by Gypsies and covered in coins from the U.S., the EU and Romania. (Identical in their distorted shape and pockmarked condition, the torsos vary only in accoutrements, position and sheen.) Adorning figures that look long dead with currency in such small denominations as to be lost in exchange fees and market fluctuations, Ursuţa slyly undercuts precise fiscal conversion while hinting at long-forgotten foundations of finance.
In undermining the logic of financial value, Ursuţa also aimed to dismantle the criteria by which galleries and museums represent worth. The range of positions her torsos took-perched on poles, resting on bags filled with dirt or stretched out as if for an autopsy—situated the otherwise comparable sculptures at varying levels of cultural authority. Low on the scale was the shorn body that lay vulnerable on a stack of concrete panels, as if awaiting appraisal on an examining table; clearly dominant was the pair of torsos affixed to tall rods, effectively converted into totems. The iteration of these fundamentally similar bodies at different levels of recognition and implied worth left the question of how and why certain cultural objects come to be valued and preserved disturbingly open.