Painted/Stacked/Suspended “Making Itself”, and A Line, A Shape, A Tool
On view at the Bridgehampton’s Museum’s Tractor Barn through October 31 by Saul Ostrow
These days, I find it more useful to approach groups of things indexically rather than thematically. Themes tend to draw particulars into a common account; indexes allow them to be revisited through changing relations. What interests me is not the connection that explains the group but the connections that keep it open. The distinction is not between interpretation and its absence. An index is no more innocent than a theme: someone decides what constitutes an entry, where it belongs, and what other entries it should direct us toward. Nor are themes necessarily closed. The difference concerns what connections are asked to do. A thematic exhibition tends to make its works instances of a larger proposition. An indexical arrangement can establish relations without requiring those relations to resolve into a common meaning. Rather than asking only what connects these things, it asks where each thing leads—and what happens when we return to it from somewhere else.
This differentiation provides a way into two concurrent exhibitions at the Bridgehampton Museum: Russell Maltz’s Painted/Stacked/Suspended “Making Itself” and A Line, A Shape, A Tool, curated by William Corwin, which brings together Corwin, and Maltz’s, with that of Pooneh Maghazehe, and Sun You. The presence of Maltz in both exhibitions makes this recursive return explicit. His work can be approached within the terms announced by his own exhibition and then reconsidered alongside three markedly different sculptural practices. The movement between the exhibitions need not confirm an already established identity. It can alter the significance of what initially appeared familiar.
Painted/Stacked/Suspended - “Making Itself” is, in this respect, a suggestive title. Its three terms name operations rather than subjects. Painting concerns the application of color; stacking concerns the relation of one element to another; suspension concerns support, gravity, and the distribution of weight. None necessarily determines what sort of object will result. Together, they offer several points of entry into a practice in which painted wood, glass, lumber, plywood, brackets, and fasteners remain legible as material and structural constituents. These are materials and arrangements documented in Maltz’s recent work, including his contribution to the presentation of A Line, A Shape, A Tool, which had previously been exhibited at Geary Contemporary in Connecticut.
The phrase “Making Itself” complicates the apparent directness of these operations. A work does not literally make itself, yet neither does its maker exercise unqualified control over what it becomes. Materials have dimensions, surfaces, weights, and capacities; arranging them establishes conditions that exceed the act of their arrangement. A stack is both an intentional ordering and a consequence of labor and gravity. Painted color can mark a surface while also directing attention across separate elements. Support can be incidental to the image or become one of its constitutive features.
What matters here is less a reconciliation of painting and sculpture than the possibility of moving between their terms without making either their final identity. Read as painting, an arrangement directs attention toward color, interval, and the relation of part to whole. Read as sculpture, those same particulars raise questions of weight, placement, and bodily orientation. Read through the materials’ ordinary uses, they retain associations with building sites, storage, and construction. These readings need not cancel one another. Each changes what becomes available to the next.
ACCU-FLO STACK 2026
Flashe Vinyl on Plywood (8 Sheets)
Dimensions variable
Meanwhile, Corwin’s A Line, A Shape, A Tool extends this indeterminacy across a group of artists. The exhibition’s original presentation at Geary described a dialogue among Maltz’s geometrical wall- and floor-based installations, Maghazehe’s composite objects, Sun You’s light and colorful assemblages, and Corwin’s heavy cast-iron symbolic forms. Its stated range runs from the conceptual and diagrammatic to the figurative. Such a description identifies differences as much as affinities. The question is whether those differences become positions within a taxonomy of contemporary sculpture, while becoming an occasion for reconsidering what each practice does.
The exhibition is most productive when approached in the latter way. Weight, for example, need not serve as a common theme. It can instead become a route between Corwin’s cast objects and Sun You’s comparatively light constructions, drawing attention to how mass is experienced rather than merely measured. Assembly offers another route: Maltz’s retention of recognizable structural elements can be considered alongside the heterogeneous combinations through which Maghazehe produces bodily suggestions. It is these contrasting qualities that the exhibition emphasizes—Corwin’s brooding density, Sun You’s lightness and fragility, Maghazehe’s viscerality, and Maltz’s materiality. The point is not to dissolve those distinctions into a shared language; it is to ask how a quality encountered in one work changes the terms under which another is seen.
Recursion, in this sense, is more than repetition. One moves from an entry to another and returns to the first with its significance altered by the route taken. After Maghazehe, the relation between a composite object and a suggested body may become newly consequential elsewhere. After Sun You, suspension may register not simply as a method of installation but as a condition of provisional balance. After Corwin, an apparently straightforward object may acquire a more insistent symbolic charge. These are possibilities of traversal, not claims that all four artists are pursuing the same problem.
Displayed on the gallery walls as a series of placards serving as wall text, and reproduced in the catalogue, is the contribution to this enterprise by the writer Will Heinrich, titled A Line, A Shape, A Tool. This text served as an inspiration for the exhibition. Rather than a conventional catalogue essay, the text taking the form of a fable, offers a fictional reconstruction of the reasoning that might lead toward different sculptural forms. Through a humanoid creature’s growing comprehension of its own beginnings as a maker, it traces the emergence of tool use, memory, beauty, utility, and art. In this way, Heinrich’s story provides another point of access to the artists’ works.
This substitution of fiction for explanatory criticism matters. A conventional catalogue essay might establish the historical or conceptual proposition under which the works are to be understood. Heinrich’s story offers instead an imagined encounter with the emergence of distinctions: between a thing and its use, a form and its recognition, an action and its recollection. It can be read as a speculative “origins” story, yet it does not become the exhibition’s master narrative. Rather than supplying a meaning to which the works must conform, it places another set of associations beside these objects. Heinrich’s fiction can therefore be taken less as an answer to the works than as a proposition whose assumptions the works themselves put under pressure.
The two exhibitions permit a similar exchange. Maltz’s solo presentation offers one framework for his practice; the group exhibition offers another. Neither needs to supersede the other. Returning to Maltz after encountering Corwin, Maghazehe, and Sun You can bring previously subordinate features into view, while returning to Making Itself can sharpen attention to structural operations that a figurative or symbolic reading might overlook. The point is not to argue against curatorial interpretation, but to resist allowing interpretation to exhaust the particulars from which it proceeds. Approached together, the exhibitions derive their value in part from the possibility that the connections between them remain revisable.
