Barbecue - Rebecca Manson
Rebecca Manson, Barbecue (2024)
For her exhibition as part of Arsenal Contemporary Art Parcours 2025, Rebecca Manson presents Barbecue, a monumental ceramic installation composed of over 50,000 individually handcrafted and glazed pieces. Arranged into five chromatic monts, ranging from jade to merlot, earthy browns to golden yellows, the work unfolds as a landscape of fallen leaves, floral élements, and fragments of everyday residue. These accumulations evoke a seasonal cycle, where memory, transformation, and mortality intermingle.
Born in New York in 1989, where she continues to live and work, Manson earned her BFA in ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011. Her work has been presented in numerous exhibitions across the United States, including Perhaps the Truth at Ballroom Marfa (Texas, État-Unis) and Barbecue at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Texas, État-Unis).
Rooted in personal retrospection of family barbecues and echoing the visual language of Dutch still life painting, Barbecue blends natural forms with human-made artifacts: an overturned grill, meat bones, watermelon rinds, and crumpled newspapers; some rendered in hand-blown glass in collaboration with artist Jessica Tsai, create a tableau that oscillates between the ordinary and the unsettling, the intimate and the chaotic.
Originally commissioned for the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2024, Barbecue reemerges at Arsenal art contemporain Montréal as a meticulous reconstruction, inviting fresh interpretations within a new architectural context. This transposition remains true to the work’s original spirit, faithfully recreating Tadao Ando’s architecture to preserve its very essence.
"The ellipse belongs to the human world. It is a humanly expressive shape that represents a kind of movement...It can create a type of space that can motivate people to think and to move in space. It has a contemplative side but it functions in a more dynamic way." - Tadao Ando
Situated between ceramic sculpture, environmental installation, and narrative tableau, Barbecue offers a material meditation on decay and domesticity, on what we leave behind and how we remember. Through scale, texture, and emotional residue, Manson invites viewers to navigate the fine line between nature and artifice, presence and loss.