Art by Medium: Metal

Laughter, discomfort, perplexity: these are all plausible reactions to the work by sculptor Cal Lane. The artist’s most recent body of work is an affective assemblage of incongruous parts that, taken together, violate our mental patterns and expectations. Charged with contradictions, metaphor, sexual undertones, and unsettling associations, Lane’s unlikely combinations use absurdity as a way of pointing to western society’s normalized habits and conventions, often with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. For the exhibition Try Me, Lane installs a basketball court in the gallery. The two basketball hoops on opposing walls are embellished with silver-coated frames and lustrous mirrors, which serve as decorative backboards. In place of nets, women’s black lace underwear delicately hang from hoops. A decorative rug stenciled with court lines performs as the court floor. It is a mise-en-scène set in motion by viewer’s reconciliation of the individual parts to the whole, and to their original function. Panties regard themselves in the mirror or perhaps measure up their opponent, which, not without irony, is the mirror image of itself. Themes of gender and sexuality are performed and imagined in the upward voyeuristic gaze of the viewer and the expected swoosh of the ball into the net. This is further elaborated by phallic impressions formed by court lines and their likeness to a work of modernist abstraction—a movement wrought by notions of masculinity. The decorative rug’s connection to femininity and domesticity juxtaposes the rigid geometry. Lane further explores the historical gendering of technology, industry, and war in her series of wallpaper drawings, which depict war submarines on cloud patterned wallpaper. The innocence of the submarine in popular culture and its reality as a phallic war object...

Text by Sophie Lynch For the exhibition Veiled Hoods and Stains, Cal Lane combines delicate lacework and discarded steel car and truck hoods to create two series of related works. ...

Text by Sophie Lynch For the exhibition Veiled Hoods and Stains, Cal Lane combines delicate lacework and discarded steel car and truck hoods to create two series of related works. ...

Laughter, discomfort, perplexity: these are all plausible reactions to the work by sculptor Cal Lane. The artist’s most recent body of work is an affective assemblage of incongruous parts that, taken together, violate our mental patterns and expectations. Charged with contradictions, metaphor, sexual undertones, and unsettling associations, Lane’s unlikely combinations use absurdity as a way of pointing to western society’s normalized habits and conventions, often with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. For the exhibition Try Me, Lane installs a basketball court in the gallery. The two basketball hoops on opposing walls are embellished with silver-coated frames and lustrous mirrors, which serve as decorative backboards. In place of nets, women’s black lace underwear delicately hang from hoops. A decorative rug stenciled with court lines performs as the court floor. It is a mise-en-scène set in motion by viewer’s reconciliation of the individual parts to the whole, and to their original function. Panties regard themselves in the mirror or perhaps measure up their opponent, which, not without irony, is the mirror image of itself. Themes of gender and sexuality are performed and imagined in the upward voyeuristic gaze of the viewer and the expected swoosh of the ball into the net. This is further elaborated by phallic impressions formed by court lines and their likeness to a work of modernist abstraction—a movement wrought by notions of masculinity. The decorative rug’s connection to femininity and domesticity juxtaposes the rigid geometry. Lane further explores the historical gendering of technology, industry, and war in her series of wallpaper drawings, which depict war submarines on cloud patterned wallpaper. The innocence of the submarine in popular culture and its reality as a phallic war object...

Laughter, discomfort, perplexity: these are all plausible reactions to the work by sculptor Cal Lane. The artist’s most recent body of work is an affective assemblage of incongruous ...

Laughter, discomfort, perplexity: these are all plausible reactions to the work by sculptor Cal Lane. The artist’s most recent body of work is an affective assemblage of incongruous parts that, taken together, violate our mental patterns and expectations. Charged with contradictions, metaphor, sexual undertones, and unsettling associations, Lane’s unlikely combinations use absurdity as a way of pointing to western society’s normalized habits and conventions, often with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. For the exhibition Try Me, Lane installs a basketball court in the gallery. The two basketball hoops on opposing walls are embellished with silver-coated frames and lustrous mirrors, which serve as decorative backboards. In place of nets, women’s black lace underwear delicately hang from hoops. A decorative rug stenciled with court lines performs as the court floor. It is a mise-en-scène set in motion by viewer’s reconciliation of the individual parts to the whole, and to their original function. Panties regard themselves in the mirror or perhaps measure up their opponent, which, not without irony, is the mirror image of itself. Themes of gender and sexuality are performed and imagined in the upward voyeuristic gaze of the viewer and the expected swoosh of the ball into the net. This is further elaborated by phallic impressions formed by court lines and their likeness to a work of modernist abstraction—a movement wrought by notions of masculinity. The decorative rug’s connection to femininity and domesticity juxtaposes the rigid geometry. Lane further explores the historical gendering of technology, industry, and war in her series of wallpaper drawings, which depict war submarines on cloud patterned wallpaper. The innocence of the submarine in popular culture and its reality as a phallic war object...

Laughter, discomfort, perplexity: these are all plausible reactions to the work by sculptor Cal Lane. The artist’s most recent body of work is an affective assemblage of incongruous parts that, taken together, violate our mental patterns and expectations. Charged with contradictions, metaphor, sexual undertones, and unsettling associations, Lane’s unlikely combinations use absurdity as a way of pointing to western society’s normalized habits and conventions, often with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. For the exhibition Try Me, Lane installs a basketball court in the gallery. The two basketball hoops on opposing walls are embellished with silver-coated frames and lustrous mirrors, which serve as decorative backboards. In place of nets, women’s black lace underwear delicately hang from hoops. A decorative rug stenciled with court lines performs as the court floor. It is a mise-en-scène set in motion by viewer’s reconciliation of the individual parts to the whole, and to their original function. Panties regard themselves in the mirror or perhaps measure up their opponent, which, not without irony, is the mirror image of itself. Themes of gender and sexuality are performed and imagined in the upward voyeuristic gaze of the viewer and the expected swoosh of the ball into the net. This is further elaborated by phallic impressions formed by court lines and their likeness to a work of modernist abstraction—a movement wrought by notions of masculinity. The decorative rug’s connection to femininity and domesticity juxtaposes the rigid geometry. Lane further explores the historical gendering of technology, industry, and war in her series of wallpaper drawings, which depict war submarines on cloud patterned wallpaper. The innocence of the submarine in popular culture and its reality as a phallic war object...

Cal Lane is an internationally acclaimed sculptor known for turning ordinary objects into lacy artworks. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art an...

Cal Lane is an internationally acclaimed sculptor known for turning ordinary objects into lacy artworks. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art an...

Cal Lane is an internationally acclaimed sculptor known for turning ordinary objects into lacy artworks. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art an...

Cal Lane is an internationally acclaimed sculptor known for turning ordinary objects into lacy artworks. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art an...

Cal Lane is an internationally acclaimed sculptor known for turning ordinary objects into lacy artworks. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art an...

Cal Lane is an internationally acclaimed sculptor known for turning ordinary objects into lacy artworks. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art an...

Cal Lane is an internationally acclaimed sculptor known for turning ordinary objects into lacy artworks. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art an...

Cal Lane is an internationally acclaimed sculptor known for turning ordinary objects into lacy artworks. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art an...

Cal Lane is an internationally acclaimed sculptor known for turning ordinary objects into lacy artworks. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art an...

Cal Lane creates stunning works of art with steel and a blowtorch. The works in her oeuvre are riveting, creating relationships that straddle the line between ornament and function. ...

Cal Lane creates intricate sculptures using religious or mythological imagery and lace-like patterns juxtaposed within industrial materials such as steel beams, oil drums and ammunit...

Cal Lane creates stunning works of art with steel and a blowtorch. The works in her oeuvre are riveting, creating relationships that straddle the line between ornament and function. ...

Cal Lane creates stunning works of art with steel and a blowtorch. The works in her oeuvre are riveting, creating relationships that straddle the line between ornament and function. ...

Cal Lane creates stunning works of art with steel and a blowtorch. The works in her oeuvre are riveting, creating relationships that straddle the line between ornament and function. ...

Cal Lane creates stunning works of art with steel and a blowtorch. The works in her oeuvre are riveting, creating relationships that straddle the line between ornament and function. ...

Cal Lane remembers her grandmother making cupcakes, then covering them with paper doilies and sifting icing sugar on their tops to create a decorative lace pattern. It is an accessi...

Cal Lane remembers her grandmother making cupcakes, then covering them with paper doilies and sifting icing sugar on their tops to create a decorative lace pattern. It is an accessible memory from her childhood that is revealing of the cultural inheritance she brings to her practice. In Lane’s series Powdered Tires, large car tires stand upright in the gallery that have been dusted with powdered sugar in latticed designs. The gentle impermanence and frivolity of the sugar seems to oppose the firm practicality and mobility of the tires, suggesting both utilitarian and domestic productions, and stereotypically masculine and feminine roles. Lane not only trained as an artist but also as a welder, and cultivated her skills for fabricating functional objects as an artistic technique. Contrasts are integral to Lane’s tactile 2- and 3-dimensional sculptures. There are elements of hard and soft, strong and delicate, masculine and feminine, art and craft, inside and outside, ancient and contemporary in her pieces. In Sweet Crude, Lane takes industrial objects, including oil cans, and incises them with ornate patterns. These cans are endowed with a completely new, aestheticized purpose. They manage to retain a sense of their former lives since they are identifiable for what they once were. The cans’ familiarity as functional objects and their uniqueness as an artistic medium make them accessible to a wide range of viewers. The cuttings depict power struggles between coupling mythological beings, urban street scenes and animal-studded landscapes, to name a few scenarios. Whole worlds are mapped out and carved from the metal surfaces of these cans. Splayed into cross-shapes, it is easy to discern continents and bodies of water in the tableaux. Up close, there are striking forms and details nestled in the red or black filigree: a pickup truck, a gunman, a maiden in profile.* These silhouetted people and objects reveal as much as they conceal, and they do not amount to a cohesive whole. Consider the exhibition’s title: The term “sweet crude” refers to the most sought-after form of petroleum. It is a vast understatement to say this is a resource that nations have fought to gain and to protect. In examining the power struggles of war or sex, a straightforward narrative is impossible. Clear allegorical expectations will not be met in the tangled tales Lane weaves. And the raw beauty of the objects confuses the complicated issues to which they are alluding. * The work that I am directly referring to is Oil Drum...

In his essay “Ornament and Crime,” architect Adolf Loos helped usher in modernist trends with his infamous statement: “the evolution of culture marches with the elimination of orname...

Cal Lane remembers her grandmother making cupcakes, then covering them with paper doilies and sifting icing sugar on their tops to create a decorative lace pattern. It is an accessible memory from her childhood that is revealing of the cultural inheritance she brings to her practice. In Lane’s series Powdered Tires, large car tires stand upright in the gallery that have been dusted with powdered sugar in latticed designs. The gentle impermanence and frivolity of the sugar seems to oppose the firm practicality and mobility of the tires, suggesting both utilitarian and domestic productions, and stereotypically masculine and feminine roles. Lane not only trained as an artist but also as a welder, and cultivated her skills for fabricating functional objects as an artistic technique. Contrasts are integral to Lane’s tactile 2- and 3-dimensional sculptures. There are elements of hard and soft, strong and delicate, masculine and feminine, art and craft, inside and outside, ancient and contemporary in her pieces. In Sweet Crude, Lane takes industrial objects, including oil cans, and incises them with ornate patterns. These cans are endowed with a completely new, aestheticized purpose. They manage to retain a sense of their former lives since they are identifiable for what they once were. The cans’ familiarity as functional objects and their uniqueness as an artistic medium make them accessible to a wide range of viewers. The cuttings depict power struggles between coupling mythological beings, urban street scenes and animal-studded landscapes, to name a few scenarios. Whole worlds are mapped out and carved from the metal surfaces of these cans. Splayed into cross-shapes, it is easy to discern continents and bodies of water in the tableaux. Up close, there are striking forms and details nestled in the red or black filigree: a pickup truck, a gunman, a maiden in profile.* These silhouetted people and objects reveal as much as they conceal, and they do not amount to a cohesive whole. Consider the exhibition’s title: The term “sweet crude” refers to the most sought-after form of petroleum. It is a vast understatement to say this is a resource that nations have fought to gain and to protect. In examining the power struggles of war or sex, a straightforward narrative is impossible. Clear allegorical expectations will not be met in the tangled tales Lane weaves. And the raw beauty of the objects confuses the complicated issues to which they are alluding. * The work that I am directly referring to is Oil Drum Map of the World...

Text by Sophie Lynch For the exhibition Veiled Hoods and Stains, Cal Lane combines delicate lacework and discarded steel car and truck hoods to create two series of related works...

Cal Lane creates stunning works of art with steel and a blowtorch. The works in her oeuvre are riveting, creating relationships that straddle the line between ornament and function. Her current series, Ammunition, contrasts beautiful patterns and imagery with utilitarian objects that include ammunition boxes...

Cal Lane creates stunning works of art with steel and a blowtorch. The works in her oeuvre are riveting, creating relationships that straddle the line between ornament and function. ...

Cal Lane creates stunning works of art with steel and a blowtorch. The works in her oeuvre are riveting, creating relationships that straddle the line between ornament and function. ...

Cal Lane remembers her grandmother making cupcakes, then covering them with paper doilies and sifting icing sugar on their tops to create a decorative lace pattern. It is an accessi...

Cal Lane remembers her grandmother making cupcakes, then covering them with paper doilies and sifting icing sugar on their tops to create a decorative lace pattern. It is an accessi...

Cal Lane remembers her grandmother making cupcakes, then covering them with paper doilies and sifting icing sugar on their tops to create a decorative lace pattern. It is an accessi...

Cal Lane remembers her grandmother making cupcakes, then covering them with paper doilies and sifting icing sugar on their tops to create a decorative lace pattern. It is an accessi...