Freight + Volume proudly presents Dog Leg, an exhibition of new works by Adam Brent. Dog Leg will be on view at the gallery’s 39 Lispenard St. location January 31st through March 1st,2025. This is Brent’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Adam Brent’s recent sculptures play off the idea of a Dog Leg, or a sudden bending in the road, in ways that are equally formal and autobiographical. Biographical allusions, more or less conscripted into the facture of each piece, recast the significance of the materials he works with. 3D printed plastics commingle with earthen ceramic forms; an ever recalcitrant material such as aluminum is shaped to reassemble as an expressive symbol of quotidian, domestic realities (pancakes, milk bottles, bookends). However much Brent’s sculptures flirt with functionality, there’s always a gap between what they represent and how they occupy perceptual space: a gap wherein a cluster of occult signifiers circulate, and which hold space for a sort of performative autofiction.
The almost naturalistic forms Brent’s work allow for, and where there plays out a gamut of textural allusions and associations, are generally only contextualized by way of absence. Sometimes this sense that something is missing verges on the comical; but every piece has its raison d’etre formed into the hallows, textures, and contours which flesh it out. Time and the Sun (2021), for instance, quite literally foregrounds transparency and the cyclical dimensions of a circle. The touches of blue, black, brown, and purple, and the placement of an amethyst rock at the base of the piece lends it an almost heraldic quality, which is nonetheless kept within the limits of our contemporary moment by way of the general off-kilter feel the work has from base to tip.
A recurring motif throughout Dog Leg, a circle is also prominently represented in Us (2023 - 2024). Here, the sheer melding of materials (not limited to aluminum, plastic, brass, and touches of marker) showcases how differing aspects of our experience can be brought into confluence. However disparate, even intractable, the materials put to use might seem, they all work to refer to the idea of a circle, which brings along with it a multitude of associations both archetypal and naturalistic. The fact that Us presents as such an open, almost pneumatic work, while also inviting viewers to reflect on the significance of circularity, speaks volumes about how Brent manipulates space through the handling of his materials, as well as what they come to suggest about time, both autobiographical and cosmological. Alluding to different planes of duration, Dog Leg might be said to occupy the subjunctive mood.
Situated between counterfactual humor and outright declarations of materiality and existence, the thing-like aura these works radiate, which often pushes past the figurative or symbolic motifs they represent, signals a new turn, a vibe shift, instantaneously occurring within the alchemical accretion of each piece. In a sense, each sculpture on view could be considered an event: a complex of variegated meanings and personalized gestures, earmarked by the aegis of ambiguity,
but still tangible and communicative to the eyes.