Flat Pile Full of Sound
Zack Rafuls and Caleb Jamel Brown at Blue Boy by Will Kaplan
Installation view of Flat Pile Full of Sound featuring (from left to right): GravelHeart, RiverFace, Like your memory, words will fail III( Follow up), BabyPink II, and Inverted Rain
February 14, 2026
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I can’t read Flat pile full of sound without making a spoonerism; the first words always register as “flat file pull of sound,” or sometimes I get “found” instead of sound. These crossed wires between mind and mouth act as a key to the dualities of a two person show from Zack Rafuls and Caleb Jamel Brown, presented by Blue Boy.
At Nine–the curatorial co-op in New York’s Two Bridges neighborhood–Blue Boy balances a mix of noisy and restrained work with ample wall space for each object to breathe. True to its bifurcated nature, the show will travel to Blue Boy’s home base in Savannah for a full month after its Manhattan debut.
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On or off the wall, each sculptural piece teases out a new strand between immediacy and legibility. We are not meant to decipher the works of Brown or Rafuls, but rather stand in their presence and experience a sympathetic vibration.
That spoonerism “flat file pull” has taken mental root in part because the artworks are concerned with or act as containers. Most literally the sibling works from Rafuls, Gathering Rain and Inverted Rain feature an image of rain-collecting buckets. The artist gel-transferred the image over a printout, creating a receding haze both miasmic and digital. In their sharp frameworks–long quarter-rounds, bisected by a metal bracket, the panels hover at eye-level like a scientific device or a diagram. The organic colorations on the quarter round’s hand painted surface contrasts the stark metal in each piece. Only when seeing both works at once on perpendicular walls did I realize that Rafuls reversed the color scheme of Gathering Rain to create Inverted Rain. The iteration yields an equal and opposite relation.
Near the entrance, three wall works from Brown mirror the mystery through abstract assemblages whose scrappy texture exude a human warmth. The murky layers subsume one another and swell, seemingly disjointing their fractured frames. The hypnotic marks–painted, stitched, pressed, scraped–do not afford an easy interpretation. Yet the detailed materials—sewing pins, mud, upholstery floss, galvanized steel lath, paint marker, and plywood (to name a few)—compress the substance of the domestic with the industrial. The sensational with the utilitarian. Curiously , GravelHeart hangs off to one side from the pair RiverFace, and Like your memory, words will fail III( Follow up) hung together in a syncopated spacing.
Zack Rafuls: Time Line (Model for a ‘Flat pile full of sound’), 2018-2026, 93 x 4 3⁄4 x 4 3⁄4”
Compact discs, NASA commemorative coins, epoxy resin, steel cable, acrylic, masking tape (Detail)
Caleb Jamel Brown: Beacon, 2026
3x19”, Copper, brass, silver solder
Nearby a sculpture from each artist expands the space vertically. Bare on the floor sits Brown’s BabyPink II. This shrouded metal mangle resembles both a miniature vehicle and a cradle: two variations on the word vessel. The obvious weight of the soldered wrought iron substructure and the rusty handlebars belie the enmeshed vinyl printed picture of a young girl blowing bubbles. What I mistook for a wispy sheet of pink fiberglass insulation, is in fact a family baby blanket–an insulator for a person, and in this work for familial memory.
Further towards the corner Rafuls’s string of compact discs, Time Line (Model for a ‘Flat pile full of sound’) hangs from the ceiling, nearly brushing the floor. Rafuls has abraded each CD’s encoded aluminum film leaving just the translucent deformed disk: the container stripped of its capacity to contain. Within the CD’s center hole, the artist fused rare mint NASA coins. Pierced through with the metal cable, the medallions have lost their collectible and monetary value. Still, the engraved astronauts and spaceships serve their commemorative purpose. Together, the leaden bassinet and levitating ladder present a heaven-bound life cycle.
Zack Rafuls: Sketchbook, 2022-2025 Mixed media
The two smallest works–Brown’s Beacon and Rafuls’s Sketchpad, occupy opposite walls and form a pair of instructive parentheses. In Beacon, brass and copper patches stem from a metal pipe and partially cover a diamond-studded ring. Enfolded in the patinated metal, the jewels are literally diamonds in the rough, visible to only those who take the time to fully investigate the object.
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Across the room in the far corner a small sketchbook from Rafuls rests on an inset ledge. The fibrous paper holds small experiments with collage, watercolor, and drawing. A busy to-do list crowds one page. Sharing the unregulated space of trial-and-error, the process in progress, is an act of generosity and openness. By including Rafuls’s volume and Brown’s like-sized counterpart, Blue Boy instructs us on the patience and curiosity that this neatly arranged Flat Pile Full of Sound commands.