Tuesday, July 3, 2012

'Lost Songs of the Filament'

An exhibition of new sculpture works by Michelle Segre, entitled ‘Lost Songs of the Filament’ has just been hosted at Derek Eller Gallery in Chelsea. An overall state of flux was the driving force in some of these works, wherein each piece appeared to have evolved through an accumulation of detritus, as if enmeshed together through a creeping fungus’s growth process.

In these works, there was a juxtaposition of unexpected materials and motifs––melting blobs of plaster cohabitate with crystalline frozen metal forms. Elements the size of pushpins occupied the same structure as pitchforks and giant metal rings. Some pieces seemed to contain weirdly encoded information from a fictional alien culture; in others, remnants of a procedure that had been cut short by some unseen force.

An enormous chicken bone became a captive specimen in a primitive display apparatus of wires and rods. Strings, yarns, and other linear elements, drew through the space in and around, intersecting with amorphous bodies of papier-mâché and creating dense, web-like structures that evoked the detailed cellular patterns often used by Michelle Segre in her drawings.

One work seemed to be a collector, a gatherer whose tendrils ensnared the matter in its path, a meal of sculptural plankton. In another, skeletal forms encircled a center eye perched to receive or transmit information, the energy lines emitting into the space around it.

Michelle Segre's work hovers at an edge where everything remains fragmentary and incomplete, on the brink of coming apart, refusing to fulfill expectations in any predictable way. The process is improvisational and fluid, resulting in pieces that are both playfully casual and intense. Incorporating a variety of materials including plaster, wire, mesh, and organic matter as well as past works, the artist creates freestanding, singular pieces that transport the viewer into a spindly, off-kilter world of enigmatic presences.

The artist lives and works in New York. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Tang Teaching Museum, The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. This was her fourth solo show with the gallery.

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