The Brooklyn Rail

Take the subway to Kristin Walsh’s debut New York solo show. As the train hurtles through the underbelly of the city, the clean lines of the car glisten under harsh fluorescent lights, and the rhythmic thrum of the engine reverberates through the linoleum floor. Its jarring lurches and abrupt stops mirror the very structures Walsh interrogates in her exhibition, The working end, where public infrastructure is transformed into a forum for critique and contemplation.

Walsh’s practice considers how seemingly mundane forms of public infrastructure—like New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) subway cars—can function as modes of oppression. In The working end, she presents modified aluminum replicas of familiar MTA fixtures, including subway stanchions, a station lamp, and a turnstile; all structures that usher and anchor a passenger through their travels under New York. These are not merely sculptures; they serve as symbols of the overlooked mechanisms that guide—and at times constrain—urban life. Each piece resonates with the collective experience of navigating the city, while simultaneously critiquing the pragmatic, military sterility that can characterize municipal architecture.

In Indicator no. 5 (all works 2024), a turnstile is displaced and reoriented on the gallery floor, its familiar revolving arms extending downward and impossibly animating a game die. The programmed quivering of the Indicator’s kinetic element is functional and unnerving, a rattling denial of the controlled physics so essential to the turnstile—a tool typically activated by its user.

The nearby Engine no. 12 is also a vessel for movement. Here matchsticks alternately stand and collapse within the pristine, polished tube of a train engine stripped naked. Resolute in their stances until they eventually topple over in moments of vulnerability, the small wooden rods strike a precarious balance, creating a rhythm akin to the sway of a subway car and engaging the viewer's body in a dialogue that echoes the physicality of a commute. There’s a palpable sense of suspense, as if the engine is aware of its role in both transporting and constraining the lives that it carries.

Walsh’s use of matchsticks and dice signals the artist’s deeper interests in the passage of time (the study of which, horology, she cites as an influence) and chance: particularly poignant to New Yorkers who rely on the MTA’s infamously unreliable timetables. Yet the art of timekeeping is a mechanism that has remained largely unchanged for centuries. In grappling with the relentless pace of postindustrial life, the works reflect a nostalgia for simpler, individuated technologies; the small, household objects here are juxtaposed against their heavy, metallic puppet masters.

In an era where everything seems designed for rapid consumption, Walsh’s sculptures resist the commodification of experience. Even her use of aluminum—the sculptures having been handmade rather than mass-produced—heightens the tension between the banal and the considered. Each work is cool and reflective, inviting engagement with one’s own image as a viewer interacts with a sculpture. Within the gallery space, these familiar objects feel alien—a commentary on how infrastructure, while serving us, can also enforce a sense of separation and control.

The exhibition culminates in a manifestation of the calculated restlessness of urban life. Walsh’s sculptures evade the static form of removed critique; they are hostile, tactical machines that resonate with the chaotic rhythm of the city. In reconsidering the role of public infrastructure in our lives—subway cars not just as vessels of convenience, but as entities that shape our collective psyche—each piece stands as a reminder of the invisible forces at play in urban spaces, urging an acknowledgement of the underlying tensions that govern movement through public space. In this way, The working end is an exploration of the modes through which our environments shape us, both physically and emotionally.