Opener 12
Martin Kersels: Heavyweight Champion

For Martin Kersels, whose six-foot-seven-inch frame towers over most, size really does matter. His sculptures, photographs, and performances, though frequently funny and light-hearted at first reading, often reveal the awkwardness and embarrassment of quite literally not fitting in. Kersels’s most recent works take his burlesque themes of scale and the effects of gravity in more conceptual directions. In Tumble Room, the objects in a young girl’s bedroom turn into shards to be tumbled and polished, using humor and pathos to smooth the rough edges of everyday life.