CHICAGO — A gigantic wood-fired vase hampering a spraying of luminous blooms reacts you when you walk into How to Sell Hardware, Theaster Gates’s installation at Chicago’s Gray Warehouse. It’s a piece Gates did, and it’s a warmly welcoming gesture to spectators stepping into the austere gallery gap. It too suffices as a reference to the artist’s early vocation as a ceramicist: Gates qualified as a potter, and for 15 times wood-fired vessels and other ceramic pieces were his primary means of artistic expression. The works in his new installation, composed of the contents of a defunct hardware store, seem at first to have little in common with such a traditional ceramic word. But in a sense the vessel offers a key into the themes of the display. Firing a lumber kiln is a communal, acutely diligent struggle, sometimes involving squads of potters inclining the ardor together for dates on end — and How to Sell Hardware, despite the word, is less concerned with commerce than it is with the intersection of labor and community.

These themes have been central to Gates’s work for many years. “Yukata”( 2010 ), for example, consists of a shoeshine chair made of repaired timber, metal, and skin. The chair rises like a throne above spectators, who are invited to see themselves in the position of the shoe shiner, flexing over the iron foot stands that elevate the customer’s feet. Like barber browses, shoe glitter stands have often served as residences of society interaction; and, like barbers, many shoe shiners make great pride in their work, an seek that is both functional and aesthetic. But their physical post, lean over the shoe of an promoted patron, cannot shunned implications of slavery. It should also be noted that in the United Nation countless shoe shiners — who, regardless of age, were for several years is submitted to as “shoe shine boys” — have been African American. “Yukata” utters solidarity with a community of Black works whose respect in their work sat side by side with their physical and at times social subordination.

Theaster Gates, “Retaining Wall”( 2021 ), 25 custom steel gabions and hardware accumulation armory. Approximate overall install: 178 x 39 1/4 x 696 inches( generosity Gray Chicago/ New York.( c) Theaster Gates Studio)

More recently, Gates has created a series of tar paintings, like “Top Heavy”( 2020 ), that stimulate Abstract Expressionism but too, via their medium, point to his father’s work as a roofer in Chicago. These wreaks beguile the gallery-goer with visual pleases and artistry historic comments, before opening out onto ideas of work, community, and race.

How to Sell Hardware is Gates’s second show consisting of representatives of artifacts from Chicago’s Halsted True Value Hardware, which he purchased in 2014 after it closed due to the fiscal drop-off of its neighborhood and challenger from large-scale carton retailers. The first, 2016 ’s True Value, filled Milan’s Fondazione Prada with store armory arrayed in color-coded rows, aestheticizing objects that were once utilitarian. How to Sell Hardware is both more ambitious and more thoroughly archival: the show includes what appears to be the part content of the store, from its capital of nuts and bolts to its spectacle racks and lighting fixtures.

Simply listing the vast contents demonstrates the wide range of topics of work that took place in the once-prosperous area: PVC and metal pipings, buns of pipe strip, containers of fucks, sanding belts, plumbing fixtures, shovel handles, a large air pump. Spools of wire sit next to rollers of contact article whose loose ends flutter in the breath of the store’s box fan. The amassed objectives conjure the sweat, science, and self-reliant pride involved in maintaining and improving one’s home, as well as the labor of infantries of contractors and tradesman like Gates’s father. Gardening tools is demonstrating that an intimate relationship to the earth is possible even in urban environments. A fervour extinguisher, collapsible conveyor belts for the unloading of delivery trucks, phone calls, and a cash container are all remembrances that this inventory wasn’t static, but was part of an active vicinity economy.

Theaster Gates,” History of Conveyance”( 2021 ), accordion conveyor, journal, and vitrine, 80 3/4 x 100 x 48 inches( kindnes Gray Chicago/ New York.( c) Theaster Gates Studio)

Recognizing familiar objectives presents a certain pleasure; realizing that other tools and objectives may be less identifiable to numerous witness elicits reflections on the perhaps distant relationship to the work that goes into property maintenance: those of us who don’t know how to use a particular tool probably depend on the labor of someone who does.

In “Retaining Wall”( 2021 ), the largest and most commanding work in How to Sell Hardware, Gates imposes succession on a cornucopia of utilitarian objectives by agreeing them in 25 sizable pitch-black gabions, the rectangular sword receptacles — about eight by four feet — often used to hold stones and other kinds of fill. Gabions are generally used to reinforce landscaping walls, harbors, and other civil engineering projections; like the objects they contain in the installation, they are redolent of labor. Gates has stacked his gabions to anatomy a big wall that slashes across the large, high-ceilinged interior of Gray Warehouse at a diagonal, providing practically from region to corner. One extremity is low, exactly two gabions high-pitched, but the wall builds upward until it contacts some 12 hoofs in height, towering over witness.

The overall effect is quite imposing. Like much that Gate creates, the bit has an art historic referent: in its pigment, flake, and blockage of cavity, “Retaining Wall” resembles Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc”( 1981 ). This motivates envisages about the nature of art and the public: Serra’s work was public in its initial location, New York’s Foley Federal Plaza. Gates’s work is public not in point, but instead in its place retail store origins and in the originally intended use of its various contents. It too originates one think about the labor and materials that go into a shrine like Serra’s.

Theaster Gates, “Leaf”( 2021 ), sword pegboard, pegs, and equipment place record, 96 x 60 x 15 inches( politenes Gray Chicago/ New York.( c) Theaster Gates Studio)

A surprising sum of text appears in Retaining Wall, from commodity box to place signalings, to the familiar orange-and-black clues sold to home and business owners — for example, “No Smoking, ” “For Sale, ” and “Keep Off the Grass.” Many small dreams were served by the store, and some have certainly died with it.

The monumentality of “Retaining Wall” cannot ignore the fact. It is, in essence, a memorial , not only to a particular store, but to a neighborhood as it once was: striving, self-reliant, full of yearnings. The long pitch-black wall of gabions, high-pitched at one tip, low-grade at the other, also cancels Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial wall( 1982 ). But there is an architectural position as well: the pitch-black grid of the gabion makes brings to mind the Miesian modernism of many of Chicago’s best known constructs. Is this an expression of neighbourhood pride by Chicago-born-and-bred Gates? Is it, given the imposing nature of the article, a comment on how building can function as a barrier or fortress of exclusion? That the Illinois Institute of Technology, really a few miles from the installation, is both a Mies van der Rohe masterpiece and a primarily lily-white academy, set in a mainly Black neighborhood, holds credence to the latter interpretation.

Halsted True Value Hardware, Chicago, exterior( likenes: Sara Pooley)

Other works on display include five layouts of hardware inventory hung on steel display pegs, on a enormous pegboard submerge the gallery’s back wall: “Circle, ” “Leaf, ” “Bowl, ” “Rectangle, ” and “Triangle”( all 2021 ). Like the work in the 2016 True Value installation in Milan, common equipment entries are arranged in color-coordinated gathers. Shape and hue create visual succession, and there’s a intimate of Ellsworth Kelly’s determined monochrome canvases to the works.

Again, Gates joins ideas of labor, office, and property with aesthetic and skill historic concerns. “This exhibition examines my insisting that the world is not separated between high-pitched objects and low-spirited objects, ” he says, quoted in the press release, “but preferably, that the master has the capacity to determine the designation of each.” Near the wall antonym these pegboard exertions is “History of Conveyance”( 2021 ), a large vitrine containing an accordion conveyor — a kind of collapsible conveyor belt used in depots — and a simulate of the 1913 Roy F. Soule book How to Sell Hardware: Successful Money Making Plans for Conducting an Up-To-Date Hardware Business, Practical Selling Ideas Used By Successful Hardware Merchants. The work doesn’t simply give the evidence its name: it indicates that the business from which the materials of the facility are drawn was, like the projects for which those information were intended, someone’s enterprising venture.

One final drudgery, “Foot Scrubber, ” is easy to ignore. Set low-toned to the ground in an unassuming region, it is a matter of a sequence of rotary abrasive cylinders. It ogles as if one could stick a shoe under it for a good buffing. It’s hard-bitten not to think of “Yukata” here, and its concerns with both the honour and debasement that can accompany such strive. And it is hard, when departing the gallery into a shrink street still filled with warehouses and laborers at work on loading docks , not to feel the breakup of art and life collapse.

Theaster Gates, “Foot Scrubber”( 2021 ), rotary abrasives and metal, 6 1/2 x 29 1/2 x 6 1/8 inches( generosity Gray Chicago/ New York.( c) Theaster Gates Studio)

Theaster Gates: How to Sell Hardware has continued to be Gray Warehouse( 2044 West Carroll Ave ., Chicago, Illinois) through July 31.

Read more: hyperallergic.com