The Brooklyn Rail

Mira Dayal’s second solo exhibition at Spencer Brownstone is understated in a sharply inventive way. Entering the gallery, one encounters what appears to be an ensemble of steel templates arrayed across the expansive concrete floor space that together form an arcana of post-industrial hieroglyphs. The show’s barely descriptive title, Steel Model of Paper Copy of Desk Top with Pencil Groove, is a kind of conceptual feint. Its prepositional piling-on—the “of-of-with” construction—is less a straightforward label than a quiet cue to Dayal’s modus operandi: a meticulous parsing of material translations and linguistic slippages. It’s in this recursive logic, this chain of representations, that the work finds its métier. In other words, how this work is seen is precisely why these works are to be seen together. The majority of these floor-hugging sculptures derive from an ecology of the research study, since they are upscaled (yet minimalist) representations of desk supplies: a spiral notebook, a pen clip, a pencil ferrule. Even the rusted work representing a window valance could be seen in this context as blinds drawn for better concentration. The artist’s abstracted representations of the process of studious contemplation form a complex conceptual colloquy amongst the works, an analogy for self-reflective reason. Dissembled or partially distorted as each reference is (they are all surely taken out of a normal context by the nature of their steel fabrication) the viewer is made to consider, beyond their nested, abstracted syntax, their obdurate and often literally reflective materiality. Consider, for instance, Six-Part Separation of Inner Profile of Detached Ferrule in the Style of Bi Discs (2025). In this work, the artist offers a lateral cross-sectional slice of a pencil ferrule as if run through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Its layered and concentric steel elements are each roughly crenelated differently: ground-down gears in an auto transmission. This invocation of a simple writing implement pared back to its elemental parts wittily refers both to intense research worn to its ultimate nub and the diminishing returns of a study “smelling too much of the lamp.”

Another work that could be similarly described as the exhausted residue of concentrated inquiry is one which also provides the show’s title, Steel Model of Paper Copy of Desk Top with Pencil Groove (2023). Here, the form of what appears to be a primary-school desktop (the kind with a built-in pencil groove) is cut into a grid of slightly folded steel squares so that one gets the dual impression of planar disassembly and upheaval. The neutral surface of the objective “study” therefore takes on a giddy feeling of active change and dissolution. Spiral-Bound Notebook Remainder (2022–25) uses as its model a generic notebook with all of its pages ripped out, layers of its torn edges accumulating at its binding. It’s the kind of useless object an artist might hang onto for a while in her studio because of its ragged phenomenal beauty, yet it, too, extends Dayal’s poetic re-envisioning of studious analysis and objective contemplation.

At times, these sculptures take on broader associations in their deconstruction and re-tooling. A good example of such is Detached Pen Clip Form Reattached to Itself with Unfolded Echo (2025). The form of a pen clip sans pen (and ten times larger) looks very much like an orthopedic forearm crutch (in advance of a twisted ankle?). The Duchampian angle isn’t far off here, as Dayal’s steel templates breathe a similar conceptual air. Like Duchamp’s readymades, her forms are imbued with quiet alchemy, transfiguring the mundane into objects of abstract contemplation. They challenge material assumptions, not through irony, but through a sober reorientation of the everyday. This particular sculpture goes one better than Duchamp in that its “unfolded echo” lays out, both literally and figuratively, an alloyed version of its own incipient objecthood. A witty sidebar to this edifying concurrence could also be the “nerd” association of the breast pocket lined with pen-clipped pens, the nerd being a major protagonist in the field of studious application.

That a very basic translation of a stationary store object can accrue such disparate meanings is a testament to the artist’s deft toggling between high concept and viscerally tactile fabrication. She tends to leaven her conceptual procedures with a real engagement with her materials; in some instances, evidence of the oils left by the laser cutting process through which she attains her pristine edges is left as a residual surface patina. And models of fabrication, such as modes of attachment, are often foregrounded, as in the very obvious staples in Double-Stapled Möbius Strip (2023). These aren’t mere demonstration pieces: they’re proxies for sculpture, though Dayal seems intent on pushing the boundaries between active iteration and passive resolution (or at least keeping those two states in constant flux).

At present, one’s sense of objective reality feels increasingly shaped by the relentless demand to process vast, inhumanly scaled tranches of information. Such a wall of shallow representations can feel impenetrable. Among all the arts, sculpture may offer the most effective means of recalibrating one’s sensibilities, drawing toward a more contemplative grounding. Yet manifest grounding alone does not yield a complete phenomenological understanding. By “field stripping” her sculptures down to their component parts, Dayal reveals a material causality that, in turn, gestures toward the foundations of creative inquiry. In this light, her oversized desk paraphernalia become close-up readings of the tools of mediation and productive interpretation. There’s a poignant quality to their disassembled forms scattered across the gallery floor—abandoned fragments, it seems, in search of a truly engaged student. Or perhaps just the trace left by focus: study gone, but its outline still there.