Purchase PLAY & MATE Sweatshirts:
PLAY, Size S, M, L, XL, XXL $45
Eleanor Harwood Gallery is pleased to announce Lee Materazzi's fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.
PLAYMATE includes photographs and sculptures created using “materials that are on hand - last week’s garbage, the jeans that have taken on my same posture, that one remaining shoe, Janis’ pears” as well as drawings, jewels, toys and children’s detritus.
Materazzi’s work has transformed over the years and has become a stand-in diary for stages of life, moving from early motherhood to a parent of a now teenager. The works from 2019 featured yarn, tempera paint, colorful pipe cleaners, googly eyes, etc., all children's craft materials. She then moved into a series of works, in 2023, where her body is clearly becoming more independent from her children, a re-sexualized, and sensualized being.
PLAYMATE moves us into more conceptual territory, still using some of the bits and pieces of childhood, but now cast in resin, like a fixed talisman, of a time nearly gone by. The concerns in this body of work are more formal but remain performative and diaristic. PLAYMATE’s “diary entries” are more about the ordinary objects around us, heightening their aesthetics, such as the bronze extension cord pieces, “sister sister” and the beautiful piece “Tatiana’s Flowers” that memorializes a bouquet sent to Lee by one of her best friends.
In Goldstar Crotch, Materazzi uses hundreds of gold star stickers—the kind used to reward good work in elementary school—to cover a pair of jeans, a molded foot, and a shoe. She props this lower body on an orange chair and photographs it. The familiar gold star becomes a marker of childhood, humorously redeployed to commend herself—acknowledging the labor of both artist and mother.
In The Last Piece of Fruit Materazzi has covered her jeans and T-shirt and a banana in textured silver tape. She cleverly places the original banana sticker back on the silvered fruit and places the banana in the back jeans pocket like an oversized hair comb from the 80s. Her stance looks like Bruce Springsteen's on the Born in the USA album cover as well as points to the humor of Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (the banana famously taped to the wall). The work references these cultural touchstones while standing firmly on its own, doubling down on a wry commentary on America and its absurdities.
This is a show that rewards slow looking, as meaning emerges through connections between the title and the repeated acts of doubling throughout the exhibition. Materazzi’s body is doubled by formed denim that still holds her shape, doubled again in casts of her hands. Two sets of knees appear, embedded with each daughter’s objects in resin. Extension cords are doubled in sister sister. Camouflage recurs, functioning both as surface and texture, and as a means of obfuscation.
Even the title carries dual meaning: PLAYMATE as a single word, or split into play and mate, opening further interpretive possibilities. These works move beyond formal excellence in sculpture and photography, offering layers of meaning that are at once deeply personal and broadly resonant. The result is a richly satisfying, multilayered exhibition.
Lee Materazzi - Artist Statement for PLAYMATE
After drinking from the plastic cup, lid on straw out, I bend over and attempt to balance it on the lowest part of my back, the place where my ass begins. Fixed in place, taped to taped taped on taped, not moving, once I make everything blue baby blue.
I use the materials that are on hand—last week’s garbage, the jeans that have taken on my same posture, that one remaining shoe, Janis’s pears fall on the ground, they slowly change shape, legs.
Creating allegory in the ordinary, I unplug all of the electronics in the house and stop the flow of power. Everything is still and quiet. Powerful / powerless. 30ft of extension cords coiled up in my knees in a squat, suggesting action but remaining still, unmoved and detached.
Camouflage—like because I can choose to turn it all into the foreground. Pattern. Glitchy. Full. The parts that feel important have a clear contour. Body disembodied face-to-face centerfold.
