You have to be pretty inventive at this point in sculptural history to find something novel to do with discarded utilitarian objects. It’s been more than 100 years since Duchamp fundamentally changed their identities with the simplest gestures, around 70 years since John Chamberlain welded bits of scrap metal into AbEx totems, and four decades or so since Sarah Lucas first repurposed discarded tights and furniture into figures that looked as alien as the world often makes women feel.
So, credit to Eva Robarts for finding a new option. Her first solo show at Nicola Vassell Gallery leans into her signature move: gradually building up collections of the same cast-off item through long walks around her city of choice, then aggregating the disparate pieces into systemized yet idiosyncratic sculptural superstructures.
Most of the works here are wall-mounted lattices, each one constructed almost entirely out of interwoven mop and broom poles from a single color family. Shades of blue, hues of red, variations on unpainted aluminum—you get the idea. In this sense, Robarts summons two types of order out of what would otherwise be random debris: one formal, the other chromatic. In terms of comps, you could do worse than to imagine something like a salvage-minded Anni Albers.
Crucially, though, she also doesn’t eliminate the flaws or irregularities of the component pieces. Thanks to the stray mop handles she leaves on, the judicious accent colors she allows in, and the canted angles she favors, Robarts’s grids all look amusingly frazzled, like a cartoon character that stuck one finger into an electrical socket. It’s this light touch with her self-imposed rules that gives the works a spark of life, including in my favorite one-off work in the show, a concatenation of V-shaped tubes from different bike frames nested into a multicolored cascade of chevrons.
Robarts considers her practice “a dialogue with the cityscape,” according to the show’s press release. In this case, she accepted what New York gave her, took months or even years to process it, and is now answering the city on shared terms. Exhibiting the works in the same locale that supplied the raw material makes Bikes, Bolts & Brooms less a closed loop than a closed circuit, continuously channeling the energy from its civic source.
