The title of Norberto Roldan’s most recent solo exhibition at MO_Space, Objects Do Not Fall from the Sky, appropriates a seminal provocation by Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong. In thinking about the genealogy of revolutionary ideas, Mao asks “Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No… They come from social practice, and from it alone… It is man’s social being that determines his thinking.” In Mao’s discernment, revolutionary ideas (“correct ideas”), as soon as they are “grasped by the masses,” become “material force” capable of transforming society and the world. In Objects Do Not Fall from the Sky, this provocation converses with Roldan’s practice of collecting found objects and arranging them into displays—from cupboards repurposed into a suite of vitrines and pieces of furniture repurposed into what can be at once sculpture and display system, sheets of salvaged wallpaper, vintage black-and-white beauty shots of Hollywood stars, down to toys, trinkets, and curios of American imperial and neocolonial legacy.

The relay from revolutionary ideas to formative material force presents for the exhibition a rubric for thinking about the assembly of disparate things. This material force is fleshed out in the form of the vignette, which in this case references both image and incident or mise-en-scène. For the series of repurposed cupboards, each vignette centers on a black and white portrait of a Hollywood star: Lana Turner, Yvonne de Carlo, Louise Allbritton, Marlene Dietrich, Jeanne Crain, Catherine McLeod, Laraine Day, Paulette Goddard, alongside which are various objects from the artist’s collection: empty perfume bottles, board games, archival photographs. In this way, Roldan’s use of the portraits alludes to the form’s exceptional wielding of this material force, recalling Roland Barthes’s account of Greta Garbo’s face wherein he recounts how the star’s countenance “plunged crowds into the greatest perturbation” and played out “a kind of absolute state of the flesh which one could neither attain nor abandon.”

The vignettes become a technology of aggregating images, surfaces, objects that reference the vaster ecologies in which they circulate. The pieces of furniture, appliance, and décor that form part of the installation alludes to a specific time and space, a patina of midcentury, and a slight skin of wear. In Objects Do Not Fall from the Sky, assemblage becomes an interventive medium that plays out the mobilization of the material forces of objects in this enterprise. By convening things the life of which are enmeshed in the intimacies of the everyday and in the ubiquity of popular culture—things sourced from houses newly torn down, the artist’s personal collection of antiques, knickknacks, and magazines—each work of assemblage included in the exhibition fleshes out interfaces of historical imagination by alluding to the logics and economies of these materials’ circulation. What results is a work comprising a series of vignettes that situates the artist’s practice, the idiom of assemblage, the social biography of things squarely within social practice and the socialities of objects and personal, political, and historical life. In each of Roldan’s tableaux, an inventory of assorted paraphernalia sketch out traffics of function and patina, the colonial inheritances of modern life and design, and the potentiality that inheres in and is ascribed to these materials.