Last fall, I saw a photo of one of Axel Lieber's sculptures in his exhibition Release, now at the Henry Art Gallery, and I became very excited. I'm drawn to intricate works, and the photo I saw showed a large tangle of shapes and lines hanging in space, and I thought: "but how can I explain my excitement?" In the photo I saw a ball of energy, with pieces flying out in all directions: a window here, a pipe there. Was a home exploding? I decided that the photograph took too much away from the immediacy of seeing the hanging tangle up close and I felt sure that when I was in its presence all would be revealed. As soon as I saw Lieber's two large sculptures suspended from the ceiling of the Henry's East Gallery I felt my stomach tighten. I liked them, I was drawn to them, but I still had trouble explaining why.
Cottage and Bakery, the two sculptures that make up Release, hang about a foot off the floor. They are constructed of everyday items: plywood, hardware, and plastic tubing. Both structures expand outward like explosions, but on closer inspection, they look more like atoms. The walls of the buildings form the center of the structures, while windows, pipes, and fixtures radiate outward. These buildings have been quite deliberately turned inside out. Cottage and Bakery rotate gently in space, revealing their insides, which now splay outward from the building's walls. The exhibit's press Release indicates that Lieber enlarged the parts for the buildings found in a model train kit and set about rearranging them in different ways. The pieces are bolted together with everyday hardware that brings to mind the old Meccano children's toy.
Cottage and Bakery explore the secrecy of buildings and the curiosity that passersby have with what's inside them. Cottage displays items from the building's inner life jutting out from its walls: a bed frame here, a stove there. The sculptures play with the complexity that buildings hide behind their walls. If we could view Cottage and Bakery as normal buildings, their outside walls would hide their secrets. I felt a voyeuristic pleasure in seeing the contents of these buildings revealed from Lieber's turning the buildings inside out. The items from inside the structure are thrust outward toward the viewer, but the violence of their confused positions is tempered by the way the entire structure gently moves in space.
Group Dynamic, the other piece in the exhibition, occupies its own room behind Release in the East Gallery. Lieber constructed Group Dynamic for the exhibition at the Henry. It consists of a series of planes created by stretched material, notably suspenders and rubber bands that divide the room into rectangular sections: some reaching the floor, some hanging overhead. In the center of the room stands the most solid part of the installation: a geometric tower constructed of cheap particle board furniture. Walking in and around the spaces that make up Group Dynamic gives the impression that the planes created by the rubber bands mark solid, if transparent, partitions that intersect each other. Passing through one of these barriers produces the momentary sensation that one might trip over them or fall through them. It's a strange sensation to have material as flimsy as a rubber band create the illusion of solidity, and that may be what Lieber is driving at. The barriers that inhibit movement in and around Group Dynamic are imagined, while the most solid structure in the piece appears flimsy by comparison.
My encounter with Lieber's sculptures left me thinking about the different ways we divide up space. Walking through the planes of rubber bands in Group Dynamic reminded me of childhood encounters with lines painted on the floor accompanied by "authorized persons only beyond this point" signs or the ever-frustrating "you must be this tall for this ride" sign. Nothing prevented me from breaching these barriers, yet they seemed very real, and there was a thrill in putting just one foot beyond the painted line to see what happened. Lieber's barriers function the same way: nothing prevents the viewer from crossing in between the spaces Lieber creates, but he may briefly pause wondering what is going to happen. Standing in front of one of these planes made me feel the desire to step over even before I moved. I felt the potential energy needed to trespass in the calm moment before the boarder is breached. The viewer is invited to walk through the work, but in so doing he gets the feeling that he is disrupting it. Perhaps some viewers felt nothing of this and strode confidently through the gallery. For those of us who are brought up short by walls that inhibit our curiosity and signs demanding our obedience, we feel a thrill of being able to walk through the barriers in Lieber's work.
