The following review was originally published by Artforum in March 2025.

The Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco (ICA SF) debuted its new location with three exhibitions, one of which included “The Poetics of Dimensions,”a robust eleven-artist show organized by ARTNOIR cofounder and international curator Larry Ossei-Mensah. Using cast-off materials to produce paintings, sculptures, and tapestries, the included artists upcycle the refuse of industrialized, global production to make artworks that highlight and transform embedded subjectivities. Ossei-Mensah thus emphasizes the artists’ ability to “alchemize” trash such that constituent materials, once decontextualized and reassembled, exceed the sum of their parts.

The show begins with Anthony Akinbola’s ready-made, Fantasy World, 2023, a brightly lit, freestanding claw machine full of plush and shiny prizes (an orange cat, a velour black pumpkin, slick plastic-wrapped candies, and sunglasses), objects whose desirability is predicated on the ability to overcome the game of chance to attain them. Whereas other works in the show employ dynamic strategies of reappropriation and assemblage, Fantasy World is neither modified nor reassembled. And its rewards are intentionally superficial. All visitors can gain is a prize they will ultimately discard. Like a metaphor for global production, Fantasy World is the counterpoint for everything that follows, suggesting that—without artistic intervention—we might otherwise be stuck in the drama of a dropping claw.

Subsequent works show how artistic gestures can digest and transform the waste of colonial and global extraction, often using Indigenous craft techniques. Another hanging textile piece, Untitled (Orange Hills), 2022–23, by Rodney McMillian, is a bedsheet made stiff by a surface pour of bright latex paint. Conceptually, the sheet evokes a space of intimacy and rest, but the painting’s vertical position against the wall—combined with the composition’s base of green and ocher grasslike stripes over which lie strata of red, black, blue, and orange—transform the surface into a roiling landscape. The effect is like a window onto an inhospitable world where the body is implicated but absent. Building on a cumulative sense of restlessness, Hugo McCloud’s retirement, 2020, depicts a capped and scarfed figure bent under the weight of a large wrapped green boulder. But in lieu of traditional pigments the forms in the painting are created from polypropylene bags—a ubiquitous and notoriously unrecyclable material. Sonia Gomes’s adjacent hanging sculpture Um lugar, um corpo (A Place, a Body), 2014, follows suit like a placeholder for a body, resembling a birdcage wrapped in scraps of found and mismatched fabrics, some of which extend into stiff ropes that snake across the floor. Also hanging nearby, Last Weaving, 2018, by Miguel Arzabe, features traditional Andean weaving methods to create a geometrically patterned black, white, gray, peach, and red tapestry. Although the source of the materials isn’t immediately evident when viewing the work, the paper strips the artist employs come from shredded Bay Area art-event posters advertising the work of his peers. Last Weaving disavows the myth of individual genius while suggesting that one artist’s inspiration comes from the compost of others’ creativity. Although accompanying didactics and curatorial statements maintain a spirit of optimism in which artists find agency in unique and idiosyncratic forms of expression, “The Poetics of Dimensions” carries an afterimage of ambivalence.

Originally conceived in collaboration with financial firm UBS and presented at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2023, “The Poetics of Dimensions” is a sort of upcycled or recycled project, notably prompted by a commercial art fair. In that sense, it illustrates another kind of alche­my as well, one in which artists transform the waste of global capital into discrete and salable high-art objects, things that reflect the artists’ similarly unique subjective positions. While a viewer benefits from the critical inquiry each art object belies, these artworks might ultimately reinvigorate the systems they aim to resist, providing another bauble one hopes to attain with the claw of one’s resources. Given the celebration of perspectives and material processes within “The Poetics of Dimensions,” one cannot help but wonder if the vision of art as a mode of salvation might also be flawed—we would never expect the same of a poem, for instance. Perhaps metabolism is a sufficient form of transformation.