{"id":37512,"date":"2017-08-28T13:37:31","date_gmt":"2017-08-28T18:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artmur.com\/artists\/cal-lane\/try-me\/"},"modified":"2017-09-26T15:24:22","modified_gmt":"2017-09-26T20:24:22","slug":"try-me","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/artmur.com\/en\/artists\/cal-lane\/try-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Try Me"},"content":{"rendered":"
September 9 \u2013 October 28, 2017
\nOpening reception: Saturday, September 9, 2017 from 3-5 p.m.
\nCal Lane: Try Me<\/em>
\nArt M\u00fbr, Montreal (QC)<\/p>\n

Text by Sara Nicole England<\/p>\n

Laughter, discomfort, perplexity: these are all plausible reactions to the work by sculptor Cal Lane. The artist\u2019s most recent body of work is an affective assemblage of incongruous parts that, taken together, violate our mental patterns and expectations. Charged with contradictions, metaphor, sexual undertones, and unsettling associations, Lane\u2019s unlikely combinations use absurdity as a way of pointing to western society\u2019s normalized habits and conventions, often with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. <\/p>\n

For the exhibition Try Me, Lane installs a basketball court in the gallery. The two basketball hoops on opposing walls are embellished with silver-coated frames and lustrous mirrors, which serve as decorative backboards.  In place of nets, women\u2019s black lace underwear delicately hang from hoops. A decorative rug stenciled with court lines performs as the court floor. It is a mise-en-sc\u00e8ne set in motion by viewer\u2019s reconciliation of the individual parts to the whole, and to their original function. Panties regard themselves in the mirror or perhaps measure up their opponent, which, not without irony, is the mirror image of itself. Themes of gender and sexuality are performed and imagined in the upward voyeuristic gaze of the viewer and the expected swoosh of the ball into the net. This is further elaborated by phallic impressions formed by court lines and their likeness to a work of modernist abstraction\u2014a movement wrought by notions of masculinity. The decorative rug\u2019s connection to femininity and domesticity juxtaposes the rigid geometry.<\/p>\n

Lane further explores the historical gendering of technology, industry, and war in her series of wallpaper drawings, which depict war submarines on cloud patterned wallpaper. The domestic material used to render the drawings elaborates on the innocence of the submarine in popular culture in spite of its reality as a phallic war object. Like the image of the submarine, women\u2019s undergarments\u2014decisively referred to as \u201cpanties\u201d in the works\u2019 titles\u2014are reoccurring subject matter in Lane\u2019s work, and recall similar associations to childish innocence. Retired industrial objects including a metal oil can and tank are intricately cut to create a series of steel-sculpted lace panties. The contrast between the inflexibility of the metal and the delicate lace pattern sharpens the broader culturally-defined binaries associated with the materials. Lace, a signifier of female sexuality and feminine values including fragility and daintiness, is exasperated by the larger-than-life scale of the steel works, and made both humorous and unsettling. <\/p>\n

The tension between materials, their intended functions, and accrued meanings in Try Me exposes both the durability of signification and its instability. Cal Lane orders materials and objects with precision; materials and objects in Try Me embody social forces and reveal their influence on our ability to perceive. Materials undermine their accrued meanings while, simultaneously, unable to rid themselves of their cultural significance. At times objects become subsumed by their signifiers insofar as they perform as stand-ins for seemingly detached forces. Try Me places these values\u2014and their legitimacy\u2014under scrutiny by making them explicit through a series of playful and unsettling object lessons. <\/p><\/div>\n

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