Works and Days

Through work men grow rich in flocks and substance, and, working, you will be much better loved both by gods and men; for they greatly dislike the idle. —Hesiod

On entering Pamela Wallace’s studio in Rock City (just outside Red Hook), you first notice a congenial sense of order. Not fussy, obsessive-compulsive order, but rather substantial collections of various tools and occasional stacks of material, all standing at the ready. Various hand tools are collected in old coffee cans or in wall-mounted brackets along the workbenches, each implement carrying the unique, darkened patina derived from a light coating of machine oil, long use, and age that verifies the fact that they’ve fulfilled their intended purposes. While these well-used tools are not perceived in the least as aesthetic objects, their gravity grounds something of the whole experience of the artist’s studio, putting the “work” back in “workshop”.

Wallace’s sculpture emphasizes repetitions of fairly simple forms, and both in their mode of production and in their finished forms, they rely on something of a serial, industrial aesthetic. Jutting into the center of the room is a stack of rough-hewn, squared-off wooden beams of varying lengths, arranged to make a series of three ascending “steps” that rise about waist high. The exposed tops of each beam now bristle with closely spaced, rusting metal spikes (actually, decapitated nails) driven into the wood along barely visible penciled gridlines. The natural presence of the materials is given form through the application of this abstract grid; however, you get the feeling that anything that orderly can only ever be a momentary intrusion—a deep crack in one of the beams sucks in some of the nails, throwing them off-kilter from the pattern for a moment, with the implication that eventually the whole thing will shift, crack, and decay, ultimately rendering moot the whole “giving form to matter” argument.

Throughout the work, she reiterates a series of very basic, elemental shapes—circles, spheres, grids, and so on—yet in a way that engages (and plays up) the materiality of wood, plaster, metal, or what-have-you. Like an old school Russian Constructivist, she seeks to make us intimately familiar with the inherent qualities of these materials, but instead of infusing them with boundless utopian potential, she lets us see them through the veil of wear and deterioration, taking the edge off a fresh white plaster sphere by giving it a coat of scuffed beeswax, for example.

“Imagery” seems like such a lightweight term for the combination of visual, textural, and physical presence of these works, but Wallace uses it to describe what she’s after. “I use found imagery,” she says, referring to the overtly intentional (rational, abstract) yet ultimately purposeless arrangements evident in her constructions, “but never found objects. They have a history that’s out of my control, so there’s no room to insert my own imagery.”

So she literally creates just about every component of her work from scratch in one way or another. Thinking originally about pouring plaster in between the spikes on the railroad-tie piece, she decided she liked the appearance of the small funnels that she constructed to take care of the task—they are nestled into the spikes like so many industrial flowers sprouting in an unlikely place. So she’s now producing a series of funnels in cast iron, its hefty weight and dark, textured patina contrasting beautifully with the rough-grained wood and the airy visual texture of the ranks of spikes.