Michaela Bathrick’s sculptures rarely appear alone. Cast in cement from molds of original cardboard constructions, they are shown in sets. Each rough, gray pull preserves subtly shifting details across a series, from surface marks to leftover tape. Their brittle faces bend into structurally complex arches and curves whose frontal views obscure linear details made by the work’s edges. From the sides, they cryptically reveal forms that look like letters and numbers.
At SculptureCenter, eight floor-bound sculptures titled e, and legible as large-scale depictions of that letter, offer a range of associations: they are architectural fragments, brackets, fittings meant for bridges or edifices, or they are stamps or blocks for a very big form of typesetting and printing. Photographs of a shelf for organizing screws in a studio accompany Bathrick’s sculptures. Titled Building 1, Building 2, etc., the pictured grid-like forms extrapolate from the smallest construction element to the finished product with a kind of guileless aspiration.
Bathrick’s repetitions are not iterative—they instead reinforce, with a material bluntness familiar to public works projects, the feeling of a pervasive, subliminal stream of linguistic expression emanating from the built environment, whether through ornament or informational signage. Further, they can act as double-takes, evoking an unconscious desire to assign legibility to silent, functional things—an urban apophenia. Bathrick’s works recall both the hallucinatory, symbol-laden city magic revealed in Charles Demuth’s famous I Saw the Figure 5 In Gold (1928), and the quieter, sigil-like variations of Jo Baer’s Cardinations prints (1974). At the same time, they pick up on the visual-aural-typographic collisions of concrete poetry, wanting to be seen, heard, spoken, and read.
In Practice: Michaela Bathrick is curated by Kyle Dancewicz, Deputy Director and Chris Aque, Exhibition and Program Manager.
