Jenny Walty

With a few free hours one afternoon, I decided to focus on sculpture now and made an itinerary with the goal of hitting everything worth seeing in my field.

I have been thinking about how the commercial gallery model works so it was appropos to begin with a gallery I had never been to (taking the role of the outside observer). I had read about Will Ryman's work on ArtCal, so I was intrigued to see for myself his retro-figural paper mache sculptures, represented gesturally and emotionally rather than abstractly.

The first gallery contained a tableau of a NY City street the day after a terrorist attack, complete with a magazine kiosk and a pedestrian, a homeless man begging, a dog.












The second gallery is crowded with grey figures in various scales and positions but all with the same stricken expressions, like ghosts.



















In Sugar, at Roebling Hall, the two sculptures framing the video also took death as their subject, creepy with self-pity. The video was campy-creepy but I think it was pretty nervous camp.

I'm going to hazard some conjectures and connections...









Ross Knight at TEAM was showing abstract sculptures focused like drawings, but with material usage like Jack Risley.

I always think of a line as a representation of time, and distinct sections of line make me sad for the end, the mortal abbreviation. The sculptures are morose and heavy, taking themselves quite seriously. They are dead, like the flat work mentioned above. They are dead and flat in terms of their emotional monotone. The finality of the subject gives the work gravitas.








I made a point to see Mark Dion's show at Tanya Bonakdar after seeing the exhibition of his anthropological dig of a section of the Thames at the Tate Modern in April. Classification is how we organize and control the world. Everything in life can be placed in relation to other things and meaning is generated by the connections and oppositions. Dion's sculpture/ installation, "The Curiosity Shop" employs his own personal classification system to arrange the objects in a small shop. The shop is locked and only visible through the windows, suggesting the shop is a private world, reinforced by the references to his previous work. To me, his work is precious for its faithfulness to the places where categorization happens: museums, shops, science... Details like the rug in the shop belong and transform the commentary or conceptual utilization to tribute.



I went up to Monya Rowe's new Chelsea Gallery and saw a funny anime-esque show by Rebecca Raney including figures that represent food, animals, people, and god.

Like Mark Dion, this work was rich for taking the side of life and including all aspects to create an idyllic world.