Art spotlight: 'Parallel Occurrences/Documented Assignments'

Continuing: Dutch artist Mark Manders was barely 18 when he began constructing an elaborate multi-part self-portrait consisting of enigmatic objects with elusive associations. For his first show in the United States, more than a dozen of these strange constructions cast their eerie spells at Walker Art Center. Throughout the display, which originated at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, cast-plaster fragments of human bodies (heads, arms, torsos) interact with modernist furniture, smokestacks, non-functional machines, tripods and quasi-industrial apparatus. His "Ramble Room Chair" is shown here. Manders, now 43, hopes that these odd pairings will trigger poetic associations and fresh intuitions about the material universe, which is, he believes, "more complex than the world of language that has been embedded in it."