"Today and Others," installation view, 2009. Courtesy of Queen's Nails Projects, San Francisco.

Ian McDonald's exhibition at Queen's Nails Projects comprises fourteen handmade objects in five enigmatic groupings that flout distinctions between design, museum, and gallery displays. Evincing a simpler approach than his previous work, McDonald's tussle with the production mechanisms of capitalism seems to have morphed from emulation to rejection. Glossy mould works have given way to thrown, sculpted and crafted pieces, simple drip glazes in neutral tones, and more recognizably functional objects: lamps, storage urns, and benches. The work's detail resides in such unexpected places as the glass marbles atop lids of ceramic jars or buried in the back wall, a flash of lilac burnishing the leg of a redwood bench, or the curious circular object glazed and covered in gold leaf. As with McDonald's previous installations, most of the (untitled) pieces are arranged on pedestals, and in this incarnation further framed by plaques or benches.

Although the highlighted objects are indisputably the focus, they are distanced from their functionality through the artist's co-opting of conventional hierarchies reserved for the presentation of items of value. McDonald's insistence that no integral worth resides in the conceptual, formal, or functional properties of objects is perhaps best summed up by the penny pressed into the surface of a ceramic ball--the copper piece's inclusion in a system (whether monetary or artistic) assigns it symbolic value, rather than the coin's true worth as 97.5 percent zinc. The analogy with art is as inescapable as McDonald's pointed refutation of the economics of excess, his work ultimately suggesting that today need not be like all the others.

Ian McDonald: "Today and Others" is on view at Queen's Nails Projects in San Francisco through October 3, 2009.