Smith’s installation at MASS MoCA addresses labor, inspired by a neighboring car wash; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA)

In Michael E. Smith’s “The makings of you,” the residue left by creative and custodial acts produces a chorus of exhausted sculptural subjects. Inspired by and partly installed in the Best Way Car Wash, a small business that shares a property line with the museum, Smith’s exhibition draws the sudsy automative vernacular into the institution, and an artwork overflows from the galleries into the car wash.

In the central room of the show’s three galleries, we encounter a group of typically inert objects in a state of suspended animation. Glass bowls spill over the brims of washtubs like bubbles. A set of slim, wooden planks sporting Smith’s worn-in Nikes suggests legs in repose or in a state of emergency. With wood chewed down to the bone and shoes reddened as if bloodied, the legs, like so many of Smith’s sculptures, bear the traces of prior labor, both manual and artistic. Neither at work nor off work, they appear instead to have survived work—exhausted, injured, and expended.

Smith runs this narrative of labor through the handy stand-in of the Best Way Car Wash, in which he has installed a birdhouse and blue floodlights. Bathed in a crepuscular blue glow, Smith seems to suggest that the work day is done and the birds have gone home to roost. The domestic structure holds out the innocent promise of refuge and rest, but the self-service business remains open day and night, offering only a temporary and inhospitable shelter.

Back in the gallery, Smith has scaled down and reproduced the car wash in a pair of models made from papier-mâché that measure about the size of coffee tables. The first of these rectangular structures has been left with its newspaper exterior exposed, as if still in production, while the other has been coated in white. On top of each lie small paintings dominated by white and punctuated by blocks of color, graphic marks, and cartoonish gestures reminiscent of power outlets and car headlights. Titled arc wash (all works 2026), these plinths recall a pair of beds or small coffins, atop which the artist has laid his own compositions to rest. Smith’s hand is unusually visible in these artworks, a departure from his tendency to obfuscate the traces of his process.

Surrounding these sculptures are buckets and suds—items one associates with a car wash—abstracted and arranged across the gallery floor. A bucket in the corner of the room contains a diffuse blue floodlight, the only illumination in the dim gallery. The overhead lamps have been unplugged, cords left to dangle, rendering the museum’s infrastructural apparatus sculptural. A second bucket (overturned), titled you can sit here, offers a panoramic view of the central room, from which vantage the assemblage of objects snaps into a tableau. The humble bucket, the seat most associated with the laboring body, offers contemporary art’s tireless consumer a place to relax. Together, the vessels enable sight and rest, folding viewers into the exhibition’s exhausted framework.

Beside arc wash, Smith has placed a sculpture, untitled, comprised of metal rods welded together to resemble a stick figure. With knees bent, shins tucked under, and straw hat bowed toward the floor, the subject exudes a sense of belatedness—dejection after devotion or rest after prayer. From the gallery guide, we learn that the artist made this sculpture and others during long, sleepless nights in the studio and on site at the museum while installing the show. For an instant here, Smith and his sculptural avatars collapse together, exhausted by their respective labors.

"The makings of you" is on view through April 18, 2027.