Cambridge, Ontario, Canada
“Industrial Intimacies,” a retrospective of Cal Lane’s work dating back to 1998 (on view through April 19, 2026), ably demonstrates how she takes objects and materials of purpose and utility, mostly guts them of those factors, and turns them aesthetically inside-out. Ancestral Weights, Judy and Broken Ancestral Weights (both 2022) offer a case in point for this kind of transfiguration. They stop just short of being gym equipment, work-out gear to pump iron. There are two sets of barbells, but Lane has voided any expectation of functionality, for in place of metal weights on the ends of each work there is instead porcelain dishware—dinner plates, threaded on to the barbells in lieu of the contextual norm. Ancestral Weights, Judy hangs neatly suspended, trophy-like, on the wall, all but ready to be plucked off; Broken Ancestral Weights, on the other hand, rests on a low floor plinth, some of the plates shattered, pieces of ceramic scattered about as if the piece had been dropped there, heavy with the weight of transfigured expectations.
Or there’s Pantie Can (2015), a small, handheld steel gas can that Lane’s rewrought with a plasma cutter, mapping out a textile pattern into a form that’s become something of a hallmark for her: a pair of women’s panties (albeit one with a screw-top spout and handle). Indeed, there are several iterations of steel panties in the exhibition, all made of repurposed metal artifacts. “Intimacies” indeed.
So, if Lane’s work has sundered the claims of the utile, does it represent a frontal attack on the lineage of the Duchampian readymade? Think about it: these pieces have, as their origins, objects that might have been used on a daily basis with nary a second thought. After Lane has reworked them into something other, those origins remain just recognizable; I can still see the spout and handle of the gas can behind the steel panties, and the plates impaled on either end of a barbell clearly hearken back to, say, Sunday family meals. But what I primarily see are foregrounded other somethings. Lane’s sculptures may flicker back and forth between their anonymous origins and her newnesses, but in the end, those newnesses successfully supersede their historical origins every damn time. Hood (2023) may have once been an integral component of a vehicle, but you’d hardly know it; hanging on a gallery wall, eaten away by the weave of floral patterns cut into it, it now forms an aesthetic object that might very well reference a woman’s lace collar. The hood’s still there, but only just.
Lane’s newnesses are also materially subtractive in light of the incised patterns cut by her oxyacetylene torch or plasma cutter. Shovels (2016) and Untitled (Wheel Barrow) (2007) demonstrate this to both great effect and affect. The working blades of the shovels (three of them, hung in a row on a wall) are so cut away as to utterly negate function, foregrounding a pattern of positive and negative spaces that shape images of flowers. The workaday wheelbarrow is likewise neutered, its tough steel body made porous and exquisite with a floral pattern. Lane’s excisions may evacuate our utilitarian associations, but they still tend toward the purposefulness of imagery, of tell-tale patterns, appropriate to an object’s origins.
And speaking of pattern: while textile patterns cut into steel objects are what Lane’s best known for (so far), she has also done site- and material-specific works that forgo the kind of permanence and objecthood that steel might suggest and instead engage the lowliness of dirt, sand, and even sugar. She’s done such pieces as temporary installations, using templates cut with rug-like patterns through which materials leave their geometric residue on the floor, all of it swept up and away afterwards.
A kind of mark-making of temporal dimension, these works might denote an end to Lane’s confrontations with the readymade and consequently speak of potential new directions in her work. She’s included one such piece here. Dirt Rug (2026) is just that, a textile pattern wrought with soil. It’s not terribly large, and, oddly, it’s not on the floor but rather constrained by the dimensions of the rectangular plinth on which it’s set. Previous iterations of this kind of work were done directly on the floor, with no intermediary. And there was a certain intrinsic messiness to them—lines of swept dirt or sand creating a fragile, uneven edge. But any edge here belongs to the clean rectangular plinth, not the piece itself. Dirt Rug is far too neat, far too tidy: inert.
I would suspect this is an aberration, its tight fit forced by demands of the gallery space, visitor traffic, and the length of the exhibition. And that’s unfortunate. Sanitized, Dirt Rug takes us nowhere. Better the mess. Better the dirty.
