Mel Kendrick: Tilt
David Nolan Gallery, 24 East 81st Street, 4th floor, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through June 6
Mel Kendrick’s ninth solo exhibition at David Nolan consists of free-standing pieces, as well as wooden sculptures and cast paper-pulp works mounted on the wall. Each sculpture is made by cutting and rejoining a single board or excavating parts from a solid piece and reorganizing them to make a new form. Nothing is thrown away or added to the source, which invites viewers to disassemble them in their mind’s eye until they arrive at what the form might have originally looked like. That interplay — a reversal of Kendrick’s process — is one of the delights of engaging with his work. Within that experience, the viewer senses Kendrick’s independence from fabrication and dependence on assistants and high-tech machinery, and all that capitalist access calls up in this disparate world, in favor of a pared-down aesthetic engagement with ordinary materials. — John Yau
