It isn’t easy being architecture, a seemingly absurd aspiration that makes perfect sense to Allan Wexler. A conceptual multimedia artist, he considers most human activity, from breathing to simply placing a chair before a table, as metaphysical phenomena. Since his early years as an upstart architecture student in the seventies, he’s avoided designing yet another building. As an artist he prefers asking questions about architecture, such as “How do the structures we build influence the rituals of daily living?” The twenty-two thoughtfully selected works in Probably True, Wexler’s first solo exhibition at Jane Lombard Gallery, navigate the inflection points of his eclectic thinking.
The exhibition opens with Reframing Nature (2015), a three-part multimedia work introducing Wexler’s approach to architecture as a thought process, a tool for creating art. It features a curved tree branch and asks, “How does this bowed limb become a structural support?” Reminiscent of a surgeon straightening a serpentine spine, Wexler transitions from a photograph of the branch with cut-out spaces to a wedge-studded wooden sculpture, an erect form recalling the archaic origins of a 2x4 plank of wood. Reframing Nature thus distills the ABCs of Wexler’s practice: take an ordinary object, subject it to ever so slight but strategic interventions, and reinvent it as art transcending the object’s initial purpose.
This protocol consistently informs Wexler’s drawing, painting, photography, and sculpture as it provides a framework for his psychological constructs, aspects of human behavior we may sense but cannot see. Four People Wearing a Television (1991), for example, makes invisible attitudes lurking beneath the surface of daily interactions more conspicuous by humorously making use of architectural elements. Set on a small plywood board, four wax figures sit on dollhouse-scaled chipboard furniture watching TV. A fretwork of wooden scaffolding attaches these figures to one another and to the television, a bizarre construction graphically outlining the way a shared focus on home entertainment often disguises dysfunctional relationships. Interchange (2008), one of Wexler’s iconic chair works, delivers a similar psychological punch with two generic chairs placed face-to-face. They sprout incongruously elongated legs looping, curving, and then meeting along the floor. This circuitous labyrinth, paired with the Benjamin Moore colors in which they are painted—one is “Navajo White,” the other “China White”—directly targets our individual differences, our prejudices, and the unspoken antagonisms festering beneath many surface conversations.
