To navigate the streamlined sculptures of John Dreyfuss, one glides over gentle swells, negotiating attenuated ridges or sudden apertures before the undulations pick up again. At times, the shifts in plane barely pass notice; at others, they induce a vertiginous thrill.
Archive
Adrian Saxe
SANTA MONICA Frank Lloyd Gallery While Adrian Saxe’s previous work embodied dual aspects of beauty—penetrating attraction and a natural link to the grotesque—the work in his recent exhibition, “GRIN,” is not easy on the eye. The sculptures are freeform Surrealist objects that make suspect everything that categorizes the sense of things.
Brad Miller
SANTA BARBARA Cabana Home At the core of Brad Miller’s unusually diverse work—ceramic vessels, “burn” paintings, site-specific installations—there is a principle shared by set theory, blastocoels (early dividing embryos), electron dispersions, computer programming, compositional aesthetics, and political economies.
Matt Hoyt
NEW YORK Bureau Matt Hoyt recently presented an inspired, albeit somewhat quizzical show of very, very small sculptures, arranged on shelves in Bureau’s diminutive Lower East Side space. These small wonders are striking in their specificity of form, repaying Hoyt’s considerable investment of time and labor.
“Tool Use”
DUBLIN Oonagh Young Gallery “Tool-Use” provoked surprise, dismay, and disorientation. Though modestly scaled objects clung to the gallery walls and occupied the floor, the space felt bereft of material content, hollowed out somehow, more unoccupied than if it were empty.
Hauntings: Susan Hiller
A pioneer of multimedia installation art in the 1980s, Susan Hiller went on to create a complex body of work that subverts our understanding of reality, offering an intellectual investigation into the darkest recesses of the human imagination.
From the Dirt: Corin Hewitt
Since 2007 Corin Hewitt has produced a series of evolving works that blend sculpture, photography, and performance. The most recent of these appeared at the Laurel Gitlin Gallery in New York last year, and a new iteration is scheduled to open at the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art in January 2013.
Michael Combs
NEW YORK Salomon Contemporary “Be All You Can’t Be,” Michael Combs’s first solo exhibition in New York, featured a white elephant in the middle of the room. Standing atop a delicate, hand-carved pillow, the creature (cast from a rubber toy, then enhanced to resemble a charging bull), is small in size but symbolically huge.
Between Fun and Desperation: Erwin Wurm
Since the 1980s, Austrian artist Erwin Wurm has worked to expand traditional notions of sculpture. Through his “one-minute sculptures,” which document conceptual performances in films and photographs, he invites viewers to realize that actions are more important than objects.
