The Brooklyn Rail

It isn’t easy being architecture, a seemingly absurd aspiration that makes perfect sense to Allan Wexler. A conceptual multimedia artist, he considers most human activity, from breathing to simply placing a chair before a table, as metaphysical phenomena. Since his early years as an upstart architecture student in the seventies, he’s avoided designing yet another building. As an artist he prefers asking questions about architecture, such as “How do the structures we build influence the rituals of daily living?” The twenty-two thoughtfully selected works in Probably True, Wexler’s first solo exhibition at Jane Lombard Gallery, navigate the inflection points of his eclectic thinking.

The exhibition opens with Reframing Nature (2015), a three-part multimedia work introducing Wexler’s approach to architecture as a thought process, a tool for creating art. It features a curved tree branch and asks, “How does this bowed limb become a structural support?” Reminiscent of a surgeon straightening a serpentine spine, Wexler transitions from a photograph of the branch with cut-out spaces to a wedge-studded wooden sculpture, an erect form recalling the archaic origins of a 2x4 plank of wood. Reframing Nature thus distills the ABCs of Wexler’s practice: take an ordinary object, subject it to ever so slight but strategic interventions, and reinvent it as art transcending the object’s initial purpose.

This protocol consistently informs Wexler’s drawing, painting, photography, and sculpture as it provides a framework for his psychological constructs, aspects of human behavior we may sense but cannot see. Four People Wearing a Television (1991), for example, makes invisible attitudes lurking beneath the surface of daily interactions more conspicuous by humorously making use of architectural elements. Set on a small plywood board, four wax figures sit on dollhouse-scaled chipboard furniture watching TV. A fretwork of wooden scaffolding attaches these figures to one another and to the television, a bizarre construction graphically outlining the way a shared focus on home entertainment often disguises dysfunctional relationships. Interchange (2008), one of Wexler’s iconic chair works, delivers a similar psychological punch with two generic chairs placed face-to-face. They sprout incongruously elongated legs looping, curving, and then meeting along the floor. This circuitous labyrinth, paired with the Benjamin Moore colors in which they are painted—one is “Navajo White,” the other “China White”—directly targets our individual differences, our prejudices, and the unspoken antagonisms festering beneath many surface conversations.

Four examples from Wexler’s “Body / Glassware Studies” series (2016–18), maquette sculptures for his larger works, dramatize the “miracle” workings of the human body: its ability to see, hear, breathe, and carry heavy loads. Cones of Vision (2016), a full-sized realization of this series, features a life-size mannequin clothed in a wooden apparatus that supports a pair of exaggerated telescopic cones. Wexler deliberately designed these works with cumbersome scaffolding to represent natural phenomena as counterpoint, to stress the wonder of biological systems which we often take for granted regarding our personal health and the health of our planet.

By contrast, his two-dimensional, sculpture-based works beckon the sublime through stark minimalism. These spare landscapes evolve from sculpture to photography and drawing as Wexler, like an architect excavating terrain, carves a hole or ditch into a clay surface and then positions geometric forms—cones, orbs, cubes—in the surrounding naked space. He then photographs these sparse sculpted spaces, inkjet prints them, adds hand-drawing and painting, and wax-buffs them to a dull shine. With typical Wexlerian ambiguity, these final multimedia images of an eerie universe connecting subterranean earth to sky leave us dumbfounded about the human presence. Are the intervening architectural forms from the past, the present, or the future? Is this the beginning or the end of the Anthropocene era?

Burnt Chair / Charcoal Drawing (2007) also alludes to the life cycle, this time by conflating a real object with its representation. The grouping consists of an axonometric drawing of a chair juxtaposed with an actual, partially burnt chair. The charcoal fragment used to make the drawing lays on the ground beside the chair, playing the jester by encasing time preserved within its carbon and also the artist’s hand and the memory of a transient moment.

Wexler’s ubiquitous tables and chairs rarely seem an invitation to an intimate meal. As several studies on paper make clear, he is an artist who on the one hand is intrigued by the endless possibilities of disassembling, then reinventing generic manufactured forms. But the verso of his intellect sees in this physical reworking of everyday props a powerful psychic metaphor for the ritual roles they assume in our lives, be it a casual evening meal with family or special holiday feast. Jane Lombard has staged in the dimly lit lower level of the gallery a two-piece installation as a fitting finale for Wexler’s haunting reincarnations of everyday objects. In Light Table (2021), Wexler partially submerged a glass tableware setting and lit it from below, bathing it in an ethereal glow. Extruded Dinnerware (2021) psychologically elevates inexpensive crockery and cutlery by creating floor-length sculptural extensions of them, each sculpted form conforming to the shape of the individual knife, fork, spoon or plate resting upon it. It’s a bit like IKEA heaven anointing daily living as a metaphysical miracle. The work of an artist who would be architecture.