Listening to the Precious Mundane in Copenger’s “Placeholder”
On a drizzling Saturday afternoon, Friends Meeting at Cambridge is inhabited with new beings. In between the orderly arranged pews lie a variety of objects, from glazed ceramics and painting scrolls to seemingly insignificant items like found dolls and styrofoam coolers, each of which are invited to breathe with new air and animatedness. As I entered this Quaker’s gathering place on the outskirts of Harvard Square, I was first enthralled by the expansiveness of the two-story church, with light-filled windows and views of greenery outside. I was then quickly surprised by how the curated objects inhabit a much more minor scale, with some hidden underneath or behind the benches. I was greeted by the curators / artists An Hà and Vivian Tran who offered me a program (a map with exhibited objects and where they are located) and encouraged me to explore the entirety of the meeting house. I followed my instinct to sit down and become closer to, or even a part of, this unlikely gathering, in the quiet, in the stillness, along with the gentle soundscape of the rain.
Exhibition view, “Placeholder,” Copenger, Cambridge, 2025. Photo by Wanjie Li.
This spirited happening, titled “Placeholder,” gathers installations, sculptures, paintings, and performances of more than twenty participating artists. As the program suggests, “Placeholder explores how the day-to-day can be reimagined as profound, or even sacred.” I understand the day-to-day here not just as the curation of everyday objects, but also that of our habitual, mundane, and uneventful relationships with them—how can they be activated and reinterpreted with sensorial experiences beyond their originally intended use value? When does an object become art? How do we attend to the interdependent flows and agencies between ourselves and our daily environments? Curated by Copenger, a Boston-based emerging artistic and curatorial collective led by Vivian Tran, An Hà, and Wanjie Li, “Placeholder” is the group’s latest experimentation with participatory gatherings outside of the conventional white cube. Their past communal Nhậu Dinner, a home-cooked three-course meal, brought together students, teachers, librarians, and artists in the School of Museum of Fine Arts, blurring the distance between art and everyday rituals. The two-day happening of “Placeholder” forges harmony with the atmosphere of a Quaker’s meeting already present in the architecture of Friend’s Meeting at Cambridge. Vivian Tran describes the synergy of the two through silent contemplation and intimate listening. “Breathing, seeing, hearing, and being are now saturated with heightened awareness. Every once in a while, a voice chimes in and contributes meaning to the quiet. The slightest movements, of sharing space in close proximity, become magnified.”
An Hà, Breathing, Copenger, Cambridge, 2025. Photo by Wanjie Li.
The group exhibition disorients the perceived passiveness of objects and softens the active agencies of human bodies. The hello-kitty ceramics (name’s Mellow Kitty) lying squarely on a pew, listen attentively with pleasant smiles, whereas the monkey doll (Moli Ma’s You are in the Body of a Human Girl) sitting on top of a window frame secretly observes and mischievously greets our presence. An Hà’s works with found and discarded objects meditate on the absence of their human figure counterparts: in Untitled (Just One More), a cigarette lights on its own periodically on a coffee cup marked with stains, and in Breathing, a brown paper bag softly expands and contracts while making a ghostly rustling sound. Ivy Lockhart’s reception, a durational performance score of her sleeping in a white gown and animal costume slippers with sleep aid pills spilled over next to her, generates quiet intimacy that obscures the boundary between dormancy and aliveness. These myriad soft encounters between humans and nonhumans somehow formulate a residual sense of life that is not yet lively, not yet awakened, and not yet fully recognized.
Ivy Lockhart, Reception, 2025. Durational performance, Copenger, Cambridge, 2025. Photo by Wanjie Li.
Yolanda He Yang’s slice of itchy grief teases the coexistence of loss and play in her video of a bouncing balloon ball projected on the tiny edge of a pew’s leg that is hardly noticeable. Near the space’s entrance, a staircase leading to the balcony is taped with poetry in the form of a children’s game in Yao Wang’s hopscotch #3. Words like “ache,” “hurt,” and “shattered” unfurl with each step upwards, slowing my pace with growing emotional weight. Yang and Wang’s works, albeit in different scales, require me to orient my body differently, with bent knees or a lowered head, to listen to what’s being imprinted in the architecture. The spirits of their works hold both joy and sorrow, leaving traces on the steps, under the seats, and across the atmosphere of the hall.
Exhibition view, “Placeholder,” Copenger, Cambridge, 2025. Photo by Wanjie Li.
“Placeholder” holds a tender place and affords a rare occasion for being still. In the ongoing exhausting cycles of Instagram reels, news cycles, and business-as-usuals, “Placeholder” reminds us that, perhaps, we don’t have to be out or “on” all the time. Wandering across the meeting house gradually suspends my desire to discover and unearth what I’m “supposed to” understand in each art piece in a typical gallery visit. Instead, why don’t we consider everything and anything as art?—the ordinary, the unimportant, the things that we take for granted—not to place market value onto them or to reclaim their aesthetic beauty, but to tend to the quiet yet vibrant symbiosis between and around us that are always already underneath the day-to-day. I want to think with the preciousness of the mundane that consists of habits, (in)actions, and often-ignored things that saturate most parts of our days, when we take walks, have meals, or lay in bed. In this retrieval to the mundane, maybe we could be reminded of a blurred and buried childhood memory, we could listen in to a dynamic conversation that cannot be comprehended or even heard, or we could sense a deep gratitude and contentment for being alive in the present moment without wanting anything more.
Copenger’s “Placeholder” was on view at Friend’s Meeting at Cambridge on April 26 and 28, 2025. The contributor expresses gratitude to Jenny Henderson for her thoughtful feedback to an earlier draft.
