Will You Take Your Pathos in Porcelain or Styrofoam?
The Thoreau in each of us has, at one time or another, been captivated by such forms of nature as a winding mass of a tree trunk or the sensuous caverns of earth-worn rock formations, intuitively feeling some relation to the rhythmic curves and empathetic hollows of these wreathing limbs. Has Arlene Shechet pegged this intuitive connection in her own work? 
The contemporary sculptor, in her recent show “The Sound of It” at Jack Shainman Gallery, kneads and carefully plies her way through and with the fleshy body of clay, later fired and glazed into the stony, aborigine forms that grow out of the space which they occupy. Several stand pillared upon what seem like structures of avant-garde Jenga and loom with, despite their size, the authority and air of ancient totems.
“Expanding her reach into the possibilities of making sculpture with clay and glaze, Arlene Shechet articulates forms that hover between representation, abstraction, and the sublime. With her sculpture, Shechet extends the precarious by using a new coil method in which the lines of clay hold together but are barely attached. On the verge of unraveling or in the process of being woven, they incorporate an element of drawing as well as tension into the three dimensional form. Shown in relationship to other wheel-thrown and hand-built clay, the resulting shapes are both unidentifiable and unnameable in a palette whose colors are similarly elusive. Falling somewhere between beauty and ugliness, elegance and clumsiness, and humor and pathos, these material but ethereal pieces have obvious emotional, psychological and philosophical associations. Large forms: puffing and floating, leaning and extending, barely balancing; Shechet’s sculptures both embarrass and compel.”
