Masahiro LaMarsh at Dallas Contemporary
At Dallas Contemporary this summer, teeth become architecture. In Anticlastic, a focused and formally rigorous exhibition by New York-based artist and metalsmith Masahiro LaMarsh, the mouth is treated as a site of narrative, of design, of cultural memory.
Composed entirely of custom-made grillz, LaMarsh’s work pushes against the idea that jewelry is ornamental. Each piece, crafted with precious stones, 22-karat gold, and intricate forms that bend and swell like engineered structures, is the result of a deeply material process grounded in classical metalsmithing. But these aren’t heirlooms for glass cases; they are worn, lived, embedded into the gestures of speech and expression.
The exhibition’s title, Anticlastic, borrows from a metalsmithing term used to describe surfaces that curve in opposite directions along perpendicular axes. It’s a term of tension and movement. Two qualities that run throughout the show. Installed in a black-walled gallery designed to evoke the interior of the mouth, the grillz pulse against the darkness lit like relics yet humming with presence. Curated by Alexandra Hulsey, the exhibition doesn’t isolate LaMarsh’s objects as static displays. Instead, it creates a sensorial architecture that honors their origins in the body.
Grillz have a long and complex lineage, from Etruscan funerary adornment to pre-Columbian jade inlays, to their modern evolution through hip-hop and Southern Black culture. LaMarsh neither flattens nor fetishizes that history. His approach is specific and research-driven, often working with archival references and personal iconography. 7 Gates, a custom grill designed for Erykah Badu, draws from Moorish tilework and Islamic geometry merging spiritual symbolism with personal myth. Other pieces created for Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s Grand National Tour reference the physicality of live performance, crafted for the dancers whose mouths are just as visible as their bodies.
Two accompanying films deepen the show’s conceptual terrain. One, a short video by Japanese American artist and musician Shigeto, explores generational trauma through family archives and postwar memory, linking LaMarsh’s sculptural practice to a broader concern with inheritance and identity. The second film documents the fabrication of Badu’s piece, more than a process video, it reads as an intimate portrait of collaboration, one where gesture, geometry, and intention merge.
Born in 1995, LaMarsh studied marble carving in Carrara, Italy and later exhibited in Iceland— experiences that continue to inform the formal language of his work. His grillz carry traces of those earlier sculptural disciplines, tension, restraint, attention to void and volume; but they also reflect a shifting relationship to authorship and adornment. In contrast to static sculpture, these pieces are activated through wear. The mouth, after all, is not neutral, it’s expressive, volatile, political.
What emerges in Anticlastic is not just a showcase of technical skill, but a meditation on intimacy and display. These are objects that blur distinctions between art and utility, luxury and ritual. They invite us to consider how identity is shaped, not only by what we inherit, but by what we choose to carry in plain view.