The Brooklyn Rail

When you walk into the hallway of the show Real Objects (the most exciting thing that happened since before I was born!), you immediately encounter a sinuous abstract sculpture. Thin strands of metal fused and wrapped meticulously with black gaff tape drape from wall to floor. The object hangs from a nail, about heart-height for a smaller person such as myself. The lines have a fuzzy quality from the rip-and-bandage technique, and the sculpture delicately folds in on itself as it meets the ground. As I stare at it, the shape becomes more familiar, its corners blossoming with gravity into soft drawn-out petals. It’s a soft cube hung from its vertices showing a different side of itself, mirrored in its namesake, Untitled Cube (2026).

The piece mostly blocks the entrance, and even if I could move around it, I can see that there is another snarl behind it. Not an uncommon conceit for Mexican-born sculptor Shamadhi, whose work last summer in this same gallery included an installation of white spackled foam that was wedged into the room at eye level, a horizon line cutting off all viewers’ heads from one another’s bodies. It would probably be fun (and sick) to live with this work. 

For this show, one’s path is similarly controlled and guided. As a visitor enters the room from a different door they directly meet that other snarl on the floor (‘sup), Why What? (2026), a hairball of curling taped-up objects delineated in the same matte black gaff tape.  Recognizable through silhouette and scale, there is a noise of branches, wire, foam, a mashed plastic cup caught in the spiral. How do I know it’s plastic underneath? It’s the indent, still pert, insistent in its own durability albeit in some twilight of destruction. Plus there’s a taped-up engine of some sort that looks designed to blow air, (perhaps to blow up your bed, blow the leaves, blow dry one’s hair); something’s the scale and size of a computer screen, but I can’t be sure what it actually is. Some LED lights blink in cacophonous conversation (epileptics beware); redacted coins, their precise circles and scales, fold into hairy little pinches. Here and there are bits of shiny silver metal hardware, halfway taped as if the pleasure of the shine was left in spite of the lurch towards all of this flattening form. 

I find my body guided towards the floor, where a wooden object balances on a redacted can (or something), an 11-foot-long oak rod sanded down from its middle girth to symmetrical points on either end. The work is titled Because (2026), and I find myself hyper-aware of it, lest it snag my pants, twirl off its fulcrum, clip me off mine, and climax in a trip, fall, ruin of the worst possible kind. Behind this, a seven-foot planed and laminated expanse of pine, titled So there. (2026), sits atop a pile of cut-up foam (yoga mats), appearing to lean against the wall. There is just enough room to slip between the pine sheet and the double-ended talon, and as all sculptors and clothing makers desire to, I peek behind it. I am rewarded for doing so; it's behind arches into a bodily bulge. Hung on a wall nearby is its compatriot: the seat of a very sturdy scholarly chair. That’s where your ass goes when you are thinking.

Turn again and you are confronted by a raw two-by-four jutting out from the opposite wall at eye level, a black vintage high-heeled loafer cut perfectly in half and placed on the precipice. Part one, Part one (2026) is anatomy laid bare, a practical pad of grey in the knuckle of the shoe, no designer’s name, just numbers printed on the outside seam, about to walk off the edge. 

What is the logic of these manipulated objects? In this artist’s cosmology it feels like the wrapping process is an inevitability somehow, connected to what “we” as the viewer could “know already,” perhaps our easily-available assumptions. It’s when the light hits the shiny metal bits that gets the better of our knowledge base. The hue and shape of the wooden objects remains raw and subtle, not hiding anything from the viewer, but nevertheless unruly and mysterious.

As one exits, there is a sign for MERCH: a screen-printed bad-for-business card, a list that contains directives like: learn to apologize; your level of attention and care will always appear transparently in anything you do, etc. There’s also a t-shirt printed with scrawled black ink that reads I LOVE LIFE (cue Kate Bush’s song “Pull Out The Pin.”) This show is a tender postcard to the edge, a plea for noticing all things and people from all sides, no matter the swirl of chaos, danger, or precarity we live inside.