The odds are good, the goods are odd is a group exhibition that highlights a new generation of New York-based sculptors. Bringing together artworks across a range of mediums, the presentation showcases the divergent ethoses behind sculpture-making today. The featured artists favor the handmade, creating a spectrum of artworks that range from the polished and conceptual, to the raw and visceral.
United through the use of atypical materials, the eleven artists in the exhibition inhabit a field outside of the sculptural norm and resist a trend-driven system. They opt, instead, to confront formality. The artists share an interest in how the human body, its strength and its fragility, is challenged by innumerable contemporary forces — from disease and illness to dislocation in a digital world. They employ laborious methods and through their respective practices, from collecting detritus during their travels to precise sharpening of their constructions, the presence of the artists’ hands on the work remains unmistakable. The exhibition aims to accentuate the atypical disciplines that inform the orientation of sculpture-making today.
A colossal equine by Hugh Hayden stands at the entrance of the gallery. In his practice, Hayden begins with objects which inherently carry significant associations with societal categorization. After sourcing specific species of wood, in this case Cypress local to the southeastern United States, Hayden uses a rigorous process of sawing, sanding and sculpting to create recognizable yet twisted forms. The effect is a metaphorical disruption of traditional American social context. The work in the exhibition illustrates a number of recurring themes in Hayden’s iconography; the zebra as a realization of camouflage, and the skeleton for its lack of external identifiers and its suggestion of past, and perhaps impending, extinction.
Across the front gallery are stationed two large stained-glass sculptures, one mounted to the wall and the other situated on the floor, by Kristi Cavataro. The multifaceted structures, at once rounded and cubic, are the product of tedious mathematic calculations and hands-on construction. Cavataro’s practice includes an adaptation of the Louis Comfort Tiffany technique, used in the nineteenth century for Art Nouveau stained glass designs. Cavataro’s glass tiles are individually cut and then soldered into forms that resist the material’s rigid properties. The results are unexpected architectural shapes. Contorted material continues in a new work from Eli Ping’s Mote series. Canvas becomes a sculptural medium in the pronged, diamond-shaped figure. Ping slits, stretches and pulls the canvas through itself before pouring resin onto the newly elongated and knotted forms, crystallizing them into bone-like matter. The wall-mounted work offers a new formal encounter and may hint at a metaphor under the artificial alabaster.
Eighteen glazed ceramic figures presented by Leilah Babirye examine LGBTQ+ history and confront the cultural traditions surrounding sexuality and human rights in the artist’s native Uganda. Babirye sculpts the clay by hand, and after the work is fired, she dribbles and douses the ceramic sculptures in glaze using unconventional techniques. The figures are then assembled with materials collected from the streets of New York, including the copper wire and bicycle inner tubes used in Mugave Ndugwa from the Kuchu Lugave (Pangolin) Clan and Kinsambwe from the Kuchu Lungfish Clan (both 2022). Babirye deliberately incorporates dispensed components in her work, citing ‘ebisiyaga’, the derogatory term for queer persons in the Luganda language, that translates to the discarded part of the sugarcane husk. The artist’s recycled materials are a reclamation of her community, and her figures draw from a range of African artistic traditions.
Nearby sit Kristin Walsh’s ominous machines. Working primarily in aluminum, Walsh fabricates sculptures that reference the decreasingly-human worlds of manufacturing and industrialization. Forgoing mass production techniques, Walsh cuts, bends, molds and welds each sculpture from sheet metals. Her works feature a waxed and highly-polished surface that offers a sense of the platonic ideal of the referenced object, while the handcrafted fabrication repudiates our relationship to mass production. Walsh’s machines have included engineered sounds of clock-making that engage with linear notions of time and efficiency. The works in the exhibition transform the typically utilitarian into the dystopic and uncanny.
Three new works by Elizabeth Jaeger, made from ceramic and blackened steel, feature miniature human figures standing inside dark voids or atop hanging teacups. The dioramas explore a fetishization of the middle class, examining symbolic representations of stature and prodding at the societal pressure to have these indications on display. The little bodies appear fragile in their spaces, and the sculptures challenge the viewer to engage with their relationship to their own physicality.
The sculptures of Doreen Lynette Garner engage the body through a historical lens. The artist examines past and present patterns of medically sanctioned racial violence, focusing on medical experimentation on Black women’s bodies in the US and illustrating the consequent indignity. Garner’s 2017 works, Known But To God: The Dug Up, Dissected, and Disposed for the Sake of Medicine, combine a wide range of materials – glass, silicone, steel, epoxy putty, pearls, Swarovski crystals, whiskey – to suggest mangled body parts, bodily fluids and human remains. Lucy’s Agony (2021) furthers the depiction of these experiments, and points to the current inequities in medical care.
Corporeality extends to sculptures by Jes Fan and Hannah Levy. Jes Fan’s Clavicle Repeated Four Times (2022) features molds from the body of an ex-lover, rendered in aquaresin. The artist explores the materiality of the gendered body and its intersection with biology. Opting to use the literal substances that have been applied to typify identity, Fan has previously utilized melanin, testosterone, estrogen, urine and other corporal materials in his handblown-glass and pigments. The organic material is incorporated into a larger, inorganic construction. In Rack I (2022), a glass, cadaver-esque form sags over an assemblage of metal and resin. This anatomical materiality is also displayed in Hannah Levy’s carnal forms. Levy’s visual language is an amalgam of recognizable objects – chairs, shoes, hooks, medical supplies, vegetables – absurdly amended by the addition of stretched silicone. The polished steel and exaggerated formal properties in Levy’s structures take an enigmatic position between sensual object and operative furniture.
Jessi Reaves constructs her furniture out of humble materials often found or scavenged. Her sculpted forms, handmade and at times irrational, are never fully detached from function. In European Yellow Couch (2018), Reaves transforms the upholstered sofa, cutting, painting and rearranging to turn the figure inside out, revealing a new definitive structure. Reaves’ objects are a funhouse facsimile of their original design, questioning the purpose of construction and toying with perceptions of practicality and aesthetics.
A listening room crafted by Devon Turnbull (OJAS) is also featured in the exhibition, a rare foray into the sculptural realm for the audio- and designed-inclined multidisciplinarian. Trained as an audio engineer, Turnbull, who also goes by the creative pen name OJAS, creates high efficacy speakers and low powered tube amplifiers by hand. Each sound sculpture is unique, and Turnbull meticulously sources rare audio parts to build his intricate, yet minimally-designed constructions. Throughout the run of the exhibition, the gallery will present week-long, focused programs in the listening room that feature rare music records and additional audio highlights.
An online component – individual statements, essays, poems, sketches, videos, articles and additional responses from the artists – accompanies the exhibition on the Lisson Gallery website.
