Closing Soon: Kristin Walsh’s ‘The working end’ at Petzel Gallery

It’s big, it’s bright, it’s shiny—and it’s unavoidable. I’m looking at Kristin Walsh’s Engine no. 12, beautifully crafted from polished aluminum, on view in the round, centered in front of the second-story bay windows of Petzel Gallery’s intimate Upper East Side location. Upon cursory glance, it seems like a tight, titular form comprised of intake manifolds, cylinder heads and an engine block. However, there’s no grime, no fuel smell. Plus, it’s too perfectly reflective, offering images of viewers back to themselves from almost every surface and angle. Of course, it’s not an actual engine. But it’s not passively resting on a display pedestal like a classical sculpture, either. Instead, a pair of connected, telescoping metal tubes suspend this hulking gorgeous thing between the high, white plaster ceiling above and the bottomless black parquet floor below. I step back a few feet to take it all in. That’s when I hear a quiet, grinding noise emanate from this object. But it stops quickly. I walk around, peer into the three open manifolds—brushed, not polished—and I see a single, old-timey, red-headed, wooden matchstick lying down in each. The noise comes again. Now, seemingly by magic, the matchsticks are dancing and circling around the tubes, like erratic hands on a clock. The sound stops, and they drop dead.

What just happened? It felt like a mounting, mysterious event but feelings, as they say, aren’t facts. And this massive, elegant, streamlined motor seems so very factual. To try to piece it all together, I proceed toward the seven additional sculptures nearby in Walsh’s solo exhibition, “The working end.” But before I appraise each one and drill down, I stop at the front desk. The gallery manager and the official press release proclaim the artist’s interest in the “mundane forms of public infrastructure” that her works refer to, which act as “overlooked modes of oppression.” I’m not sure I see that in this collection yet, though the evidence is growing.

The next sculpture I see is a smaller crank-case-like object nearby on the ground: shining and sitting pretty but grumbling. It, too, features matchsticks, but they are standing stiffly at attention—like birthday candles on a triple-tiered layer cake. Down the corridor stand three pill-shaped, vertical subway car handrail poles in various forms and finishes: straight and stripped with matches, knotted and shiny and, finally, looped like a lasso—ready to ensnare an unsuspecting commuter.

I walk further in and take a gander at Indicator no. 1, from 2022, which is a made-from-scratch streetlamp—the kind one sees at the entrance to any subway stop in New York City, replete with green globe. Here, raw and unpainted, it’s inverted, its base affixed to the gallery ceiling and its glowing globe––which rotates with its hexagonal support pole every so often––is nearly kissing the floor. A little research tells me that green globes indicate subway entrances, while red ones indicate exits only. They are indeed indicators, objects that help us find our way—or tell us where to go, depending on how we look at it—based on our travel needs and the available systemic means to get there. Later, Walsh tells me, “I think it’s interesting how public transportation can almost be a kind of telltale signpost—of a lot of things in the world—like how the economy is going or how the city is treating its citizens. And how public infrastructure, which seems so totally innocuous, can be used as a way to corral those people—almost like an IKEA store.” Her point is sturdy and salient—and so is the work.

A city can be one heaving, alarming, rambunctious place to work and play, but many of us have volunteered to live in one—and to interact with its public transport, which is, in many cases, infrastructure that does things for us but also to us. Perhaps the inverted lamp makes viewers more aware of these signs and signifiers, our elective assignment of their value and, of course, our often routine, unconscious use of them. But it doesn’t spell oppression to me until—right after my first go-round of the show—I walk downstairs to an overheated body-thronged sidewalk, then descend into the bowels of the city subway system and stand face-to-face with perfectly unreliable strangers in a densely packed #6 train I can’t escape. Hmmm. Wait, now I’m getting hip to the trip. So, I think about the work, fittingly, on the ride downtown.

A few days later, I returned for a second—this time artist-guided—walkthrough of “The working end.” Dressed in black, the lean, earnest, bright and candid Walsh also presents a solid sense of humor for someone who has made the weighty works on hand. She talks with me about many things, including her interest in modern-day machining practices, timekeeping and diesel train engines. I mull through these items, then stop and ask about the why, what moves her to want to do all of this work in the show—which took the artist a nearly non-stop year-and-a-half to complete. “I think the impetus for the subway theme show kind of came out of the post-COVID train ride, where no one’s talking to each other, and the vibe was just really different—and pretty intense. There are not a ton of spaces that you’re in, like that, where it’s equalizing almost. You’re frequently coming up against a lot of people that you normally don’t spend time with,” she explains. Then she laughs. “I suppose that could apply to a water park or some other place, too.”

Next, I ask Walsh about Engine no. 11, the aluminum layer-cake piece I saw earlier. “Yeah, the matchsticks on it are kind of like candles. Though it’s not my goal for it to read as a birthday cake exactly. But that’s okay,” she says evenly. I suggest that the matchsticks seem to celebrate or commemorate something. “That’s something that’ll never leave the planet—it’ll just be in a landfill forever. I like the idea of memorializing what the work represents—like a trash object, I guess,” she says. We briefly discuss the imminent expiration of petroleum consumption and that naturally leads to talk about the deleterious effects of combustion engines, which—as Walsh details for me—poorly affect train transit worker health and that of riders and people who live in apartment complexes right above MTA repair stations where diesel motors run for long stretches of time. It’s a heavy load—figuratively and literally—one she’s taken head-on. Then, we move from timely thematics to the nuts and bolts of her art.

For someone who works on such mammoth metal pieces that require serious cutting, grinding, TIG welding and finishing, I’m a bit shocked to learn she does it alone—and in a second-floor walkup, no less. No studio assistants and, essentially, no subcontractors. Just trial, error, elbow grease, ingenuity and very long hours. I ask how she prepares her work. “It’s pretty basic 3D design, which is not computer-generated. First, I make the full-size models from memory all in cardboard because it’s easiest to edit if I’m going to make a big change. I keep the cardboard around, so if I’m like, ‘Oh, I’ll cut this in half,’ I’ll do it in cardboard first. The cardboard is a lot less expensive than steel or aluminum,” she explains and laughs. But the “use of the model is usually to determine how it feels in the room. More than anything, it’s really about how a viewer enters the space and relates to it.”

I take a panoramic survey around the gallery and wonder about how I relate to these works as a viewer. They are so attractive, so nearly monumental and, well, sort of brazen. They have plenty to say, but really it is their presence in “the space”—something all great sculptors know in their hearts—that arrests me. Largely to scale, Walsh’s uncanny objects remind me as much about their real-world counterparts and the public places where we find them as our common, intersecting paths and how that makes us feel. Then a rattle wakens me from my thoughts back into the place of presence.

It’s coming from one final piece in the show, Indicator no. 5, the first I faced upon entry and the last upon exit, which reiterates the show’s themes so clearly. It is a surreal near-replica of a subway turnstile—but not exactly. Instead of collecting credit, providing passage and guiding passengers to their train, it is simply turned on its side, one of its three blocking rods almost touching the ground. In this orientation, it looks like a variation on an old stick-and-string animal box trap you’d see in the woods somewhere. Under the rod tip, a six-sided die—somehow influenced by magnets—rolls in place, making the sound. Like the matchsticks in a few of the other works, it starts and stops in fits. The randomness of the die suggests a gamble to me. It’s a gamble to enter the public spaces alluded to in Walsh’s work and then to share our very vulnerable selves with absolute strangers during, for instance, train rides that contain delicate, strange or possibly intense interactions. I watch it for a few more rolls.

Walsh smiles and says, “There’re a lot of different dice that go with this piece, and some don’t have the same number of pips. Some dice don’t have any marks on them at all—and yet it’s still recognizable. But you look and see a cube on the ground rolling—that is nuts. I like that as a thing to play with.” We watch the die roll one more time. “I think one of the hardest things when building mechanized pieces is generating randomness because you’re working with something that’s essentially regular and repetitive. So, when my objects can do things that aren’t regular, that’s a really fun place to go. There are a lot of opportunities right there.”

Walsh’s works are neither animated artifacts nor found objects. Not quite sculptures, not exactly installations. They are not events, nor do they offer direct engagement. They are something in between all of those things. The irony is that they seem so tangible, so identifiable and so omnipresent. Yet, it’s the anomalies, paradoxes and irregularities in Walsh’s intensely crafted objects that help bring into focus what they are about: breaking form from the ubiquitous infrastructures in our lives—and minds—that ostensibly do as much harm as good. If we wake up from our routine ways of being and thinking, we can better see the signs and move forth with just as much caution as care—for ourselves and, possibly, for everyone else, too. I know, that’s a lofty tall order I’ve placed but Walsh’s art has pointed me in the better direction to reach it.

“Kristin Walsh: The working end” at Petzel Gallery closes on October 19.