The Brooklyn Rail

Plastic containers, milk cartons, eggs, skulls, medical gear—these are all objects meant to shelter or lend structure, common objects that protect the inside from the outside, preserving something within from the chaos beyond. In his current exhibition at Underdonk, Michael Sims recombines these objects into new, often unsettling, configurations, compelling us to consider our own defenses and glimpse the ways in which we’re held apart from a world of heightened tension. 

A large white table holds a precarious sculpture, untitled (milk) (2023), at its end. The sculpture is formed by an empty milk carton wrapped in a picture of a resting cow—one of many deadpan jokes throughout the show, tinged with grief. The carton is emptied of milk and, perhaps, so is the cow. Beige paste is carefully applied to corners of the carton, holding a group of sticks that extend downward, elevating the carton off the table like a house on stilts, awaiting some unknown disaster. A series of wooden shims push their way into the paste, each one dyed an alarming red. As the mother cow looked back at me from her green field, I began to feel as if those tiny pricks represented a kind of parasitic impulse: they wanted to enter the picture but were stuck to the outside, forever caught in the act of pushing their way past the boundaries of the work.

On the opposite side of the table is the forlorn untitled (egg) (2023). Broken eggshells overlap in an arrested process of reassembly, somehow holding together without forming a whole. Peering through their openings I discovered meticulous brickwork sculpted on the verso side, unexpectedly refined. This miniature wall, which seemed to wrap and twist forever, looked muscular and fleshy. There was also a plastic tongue inside, perhaps a teaching device for medical students, and two nearby orbs mounted on a plastic prop, both wrapped in the same surreal masonry, one with a tiny open eyeball. The combinations here are nightmarish, but there is also an element of pathos. I found myself wanting to care for this monstrous cast-off thing, as it spoke to the monstrous cast-off parts of my own subjectivity.

Sims’s sculptures possess a wonderful sense of informality balanced with intense consideration and craftsmanship. In untitled (helmet) (2024) we see Sims lean toward the latter, striking a more solemn tone, and the result is all the better for it. Shaped like a gourd, the sculpture’s round bottom is cast from two bicycle helmets joined at their circumferences. Its neck is cast from a CAM boot—meant for ankle and foot injuries—fusing seamlessly to the base. Perforated with vents on all sides, the vessel looks both skeletal and exoskeletal, ancient and futuristic at once. Looking inside from the open top, one can see a crystal-like substance lining the interior as well as a stack of animal bones, which plug up or protrude through the sculpture’s openings. Painted in a uniform gray, the sculpture stands like a ghostly citadel, its pieced-together parts mostly self-contained.

The gallery itself takes on the character of Sims’s work, filling the space with an overall sense of instability, of things that are less secure than they first appear. The sculptures are insular but filled with punctures, their protective dispositions giving way to a sense of openness. This is a struggle that I recognize as my own, the attempt to hold things together even as they fall apart. We exist in the same world as Sims, our defenses necessarily pieced together from what’s on-hand, ever-shifting and as fragile and fragmented as the sculptures themselves.