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Raw Attraction

2001
Not on view
Booker frequently uses preexisting, cast-off materials in her work, most distinctively the discarded rubber tires she salvages from city streets, auto-repair shops, and dumps. Raw Attraction highlights her ability to transform commonplace industrial materials into quasi-organic, bizarre, or threatening forms through intensive processes of cutting, sewing, shredding, and bending. This mound of sliced and gathered tire pieces takes on the look of feathers or scales covering an ambiguous hulking creature. Nestled in this mass are rows of curved rubber pieces that resemble a vulva, from which a sharp piece of steel protrudes. This jarring detail suggests the historical and literary conceit of the vagina dentata, or emasculating woman, a recurring motif of early twentieth-century Surrealism.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Raw Attraction
  • Artist: Chakaia Booker (American, born Newark, New Jersey, 1953)
  • Date: 2001
  • Medium: Rubber tire, steel, and wood
  • Dimensions: 42 × 32 × 40 in. (106.7 × 81.3 × 101.6 cm)
    Weight: 263 lb. (119.3 kg)
  • Classification: Sculpture
  • Credit Line: Hortense and William A. Mohr Sculpture Purchase Fund, 2001
  • Object Number: 2001.413
  • Rights and Reproduction: © Chakaia Booker
  • Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art

More Artwork

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Untitled
Multiple artists/makers
2011
Untitled (XIV)
Chakaia Booker
Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop
2010
Untitled (X)
Chakaia Booker
Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop
2010
Untitled, Robert Gober American, Bronze, shoe polish, plaster and painted resin
Untitled
Robert Gober
1994–2001
Chair, Ray Komai American, Plywood, cherry wood, steel, rubber
Chair
Ray Komai
JG Furniture Co., Inc, New York, NY
1949

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