Five hundred words — my present limit — is criminally thrifty when it comes to evaluating the work of Allan Wexler. The artist is 74 years old. There are 27 works in his current show at Jane Lombard Gallery, and it’s his first exhibition in nearly 10 years.
An architect by training, Wexler creates wonderfully clever, imaginative, and elegant sculptures that magnify the absurdities of everyday activities. In the center of the white, windowless, subterranean downstairs of the gallery, for instance, sits “Light Table” (2021). Constructed of simple planar volumes and painted institutional gray, the sculpture is determinedly grim. Clear glass dishes and bowls, laid out as though for a meal, are partially submerged into the tabletop. Bright white lights illuminate the glassware from below. A tangled viscera of black electrical cords droop below the table, delivering power to the lights and adding a touch of the dystopian. In leaving the cords so casually exposed, Wexler makes clear that he isn’t performing a magic trick but rather presenting an industrial effect, something managed through mechanical devices and integrated into the world of power grids and domestic untidiness. If his work is otherworldly, its strangeness is still tethered to this one.
The didacticism of Wexler’s titles often belies the easy wit of his sculptures. In “Reframing Nature” (2015), a twisting tree branch is represented in a triadic series: first, as a photo; then, as a photo that has been sliced apart and collaged such that the branch appears straight; and finally, as a physical branch into which wooden wedges have been driven in order to unbend it. In other words, the branch, grievously wounded, is treated with a form of its own mutilated material that not only fills its lacerations but keeps them open. It’s a bit of craftwork that speaks directly to the artist-builder’s heart — to the issue of plumbness, to the continual battle of carpenters against warps and bows and bends, and to a culture of production that forcefully imposes regularity on peculiarity. Incidentally, the word “true” — part of the two-word title of the show, Probably True — is woodworking nomenclature for “straight.”
Some of Wexler’s most memorable works are design interventions that refashion social relations. In the 1990 sculpture “Coffee Seeks its Own Level,” four coffee mugs are tethered together with tubing that intersects at a four-way node, such that the action of lifting one cup sends liquid flowing through the tubes to lower ones. Coordination, then, is required for each person to drink. It is an optimistic work: It suggests that design might bestow beauty on our lives, that physical objects might foster tenderness and commonality.
Just two decades later, however, Wexler’s designs seemed largely intended to counter the ill effects of other, far more prevalent designs. In his current show, several maquettes for wearable apparatuses seem to address the problem of breathing within a toxified atmosphere. And “Phone Silencer” (2017), an elaborately insulated suitcase, offers a means of isolating from that most inescapable of devices — one that also promised to bring us into greater communion. Wexler’s work is often described as “speculative.” One is reminded that speculation is synonymous with risk.
Allan Wexler: Probably True continues at Jane Lombard Gallery (58 White Street, Tribeca, Manhattan) through March 8. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
