Cal Lane
Hook Ups and Lay Ups
2017

About the Item

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 is further contrasted by the domestic material used to render the drawings. Like the image of the submarine, women’s undergarments—decisively referred to as “panties” in the works’ titles—are reoccurring subject matter in Lane’s work, and recall similar associations to childish innocence. Retired industrial objects including a metal oil can and tank are intricately cut to create a series of steel-sculpted lace panties. The contrast between the inflexibility of the metal and the delicate lace pattern sharpens the broader culturally-defined binaries associated with the materials. Lace, a signifier of female sexuality and feminine values including fragility and daintiness, is exasperated by the larger-than-life scale of the steel works, and made both humorous and unsettling. The tension between materials, their intended functions, and accrued meanings in Try Me exposes both the durability of signification and its instability. Cal Lane orders materials and objects with precision; materials and objects in Try Me embody social forces and reveal their influence on our ability to perceive. Materials undermine their accrued meanings while, simultaneously, unable to rid themselves of their cultural significance. At times objects become subsumed by their signifiers insofar as they perform as stand-ins for seemingly detached forces. Try Me places these values—and their legitimacy—under scrutiny by making them explicit through a series of playful and unsettling object lessons.

Creator:
Cal Lane (1968 -, Canadian)
Creation Year:
2017
Medium:
Steel,Fabric,Mirror,Acrylic
Movement & Style:
Contemporary
Period:
2010-
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Montreal, CA
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU4762164883
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Cal Lane

Sculptor and metal artist Cal Lane has garnered international acclaim for transforming industrial steel I-beams, shovels, car hoods and dumpsters into lacy, decorative works of art. While her sculptures can be interpreted as a challenge to gender stereotypes — the transformation of hard, “masculine” steel into “feminine” lace filigree — Lane suggests her art reaches beyond that.

“I see steel as a metaphor for confrontation, a thing that represents the walls put up by the society I was born into,” she has said. “Steel feels like the perfect material to carve into, to create the contrasts and conflicts that I myself struggle with.”

Born in 1968 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Lane trained as a welder and was a hairdresser in her mother’s salon on Vancouver Island before she turned to build a career in art. She earned her BFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and attended the State University of New York, where she specialized in sculpture and earned her MFA.

As an artist, Lane became interested in exploring gender roles through Conceptual art. Although critics have compared her work to that of American minimalist sculptor Richard Serra, known for his spiral steel sculptures, Lane cuts into steel objects, creating ornate patterns that reference femininity in her figurative and abstract sculptures. This is demonstrated in works such as Pantie (2017), Veiled Hood #2 (2014) and Grace Invasion (2011).

In addition to her sculptures, Lane produced a series of wallpaper drawings in 2017, such as True Barring, Mind Your Bubble and Poking Holes in the Ocean, depicting military submarines on cloud patterns. The drawings explore the perception of submarines as phallic war objects in contrast to their innocent depictions in popular culture.

Lane’s sculptures and illustrations have been exhibited in numerous international shows throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom. Her works are also highly sought by collectors of Contemporary and abstract art.

On 1stDibs, discover a range of original Cal Lane sculptures, prints and drawings.