Rachel Owens

Footwear (Turquoise Heel)

2015

AAGAR was initiated by visionary innovators committed to sustainability and reducing carbon footprints. It was Arun Agarwal initiative, whose passion for creating beauty from seeming...

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...

Sand-cast glass, steel mesh, silver mesh, and metal. 60"H x 45"W x 20"D Yasemin Aslan Bakiri specializes in sand-cast glass techniques using ideas relating to the natural world...

THE BEE The sculpture by Marcos Romero, representing an bee made of recycled industrial iron and blown glass, is a fascinating work of contemporary art. Romero has created a piece t...

The Ant, Gold Plated and Red Glass The sculpture by Marcos Romero, representing an ant made of recycled industrial iron and blown glass, is a fascinating work of contemporary art. R...

The Ant, Dark Brown The sculpture by Marcos Romero, representing an ant made of recycled industrial iron and blown glass, is a fascinating work of contemporary art. Romero has creat...