Retainer, a new High Line Commission
April 2021 — March 2022
For the High Line, Hannah Levy makes an oversized orthodontic retainer from carved marble and stainless steel. The sculpture is the newest in her series of stone retainers—Levy hand-sculpted earlier iterations in alabaster; the version for the High Line has been created by Henraux for the Henraux Foundation and is made of Arabescato Altissimo White marble from the Cervaiole quarries on Mount Altissimo in the Apuan Alps, Tuscany, Italy.
Retainer points to the strangeness of orthodontics and straight teeth as a marker of class, in part because of orthodontics’ exorbitant price. The organic form of the cast mouth contrasts with its smooth metal bars, which conjures the feeling of the rigid form inside one’s mouth and invites external structures inside one’s own body. Levy’s giant retainer is almost as tall as the park benches nearby, and the retainer wire is the size of the High Line’s exterior railings, which sets the piece in conversation with the architecture and design of the park and its surroundings.
Hannah Levy’s largely anthropomorphic sculptures evoke the physicality of interacting with the built environment: lounging on chairs, leaning in doorways, or grasping a railing. With her work, she selects precise materials, forms, and colors to conjure these feelings. Levy reimagines modern furnishings and contemporary design tropes in fleshy cast silicone and nickel-plated steel, blurring boundaries between public exteriors and private interiors, and contrasts cold materials, such as steel and aluminum with organic forms. In one sculpture, an eight-foot, mustard-colored silicone asparagus droops between shining nickel-plated steel talons; in another, a jacket with impossibly long arms sags through elongated window bars; in a third, a cast gourd perches on a pair of bird legs. For Levy, paramount is the friction of physically interacting with our surroundings, which in turn sparks an awareness of our own materiality.
Hannah Levy (b. 1991, New York) lives and works in New York.
Founded in 2009, High Line Art commissions and produces a wide array of artwork, including site-specific commissions, exhibitions, performances, video programs, and a series of billboard interventions. Led by Cecilia Alemani, Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, and presented by the High Line, the art program invites artists to think of creative ways to engage with the unique architecture, history, and design of the park, and to foster a productive dialogue with the surrounding neighborhood and urban landscape.