For the first exhibition of work by Nairy Baghramian in North America the Contemporary Art Gallery presents Class Reunion, an ambitious eighteen piece sculpture comprising a variety of abstract forms. Consistent throughout the artist's practice, it references literature, theory and modernist design to comment on current issues of materiality, manufacture and display while examining aspects of social and political relationships.
As a collection of posed characters Class Reunion forms an uncanny tableau, the stage shifting between the immediacy of the inherent material qualities - surface, shape and colour - to a more speculative consideration of meaning and content. The viewer's experience moves from a consideration of physicality to an examination of social mores, the specific objects evoking a multiplicity of personalities and social identities, encompassing questions of context, institutional framing and the production and reception of contemporary art.
