Rachel Whiteread
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA Chicago)
With casts that are vulnerable variations of seemingly mundane and mute objects, Rachel Whiteread creates poignant and melancholy phantoms. Her skewed selection of themes from domestic life, her inventive and poetic use of rather surprising materials, and her thoughtful and unexpected installation of these pieces gives them a decided resonance. Whiteread echoes her subjects, but in her system of altered repetition she both displaces and intensifies meaning.
Beds—or more accurately, mattresses—are the foundation for half the pieces in this smallish overview. In every case the mattress is divorced