Adrian Hermanides’s glass works destabilize anthropomorphic forms to queer the body’s relationship to sculptural objects. This exhibition of sculpture and ink works on paper opens with Suicidal Object (all works 2008), a tiny drip of frozen glass with a foot-long, cometlike tail that dives terrifyingly into its pedestal. Evading presentness, the glass form is theatrical in its command of space; it may be Michael Fried’s worst nightmare. Sidestepping it, the viewer stumbles past a glory hole in the middle of a freestanding wall, on the other side of which is Mirror Action, a bulbous glass protrusion blown into the shape of a pregnant belly by a motorcycle’s tailpipe. Hermanides calls it a “fart joke,” and indeed, its ungainly form plays against the shrill sonority of Suicidal Object—but its bulk also calls to attention the paradoxical preciousness of the material. Reflecting the viewer’s body, Mirror Action returns a tenuous, entropic freak show.
Hermanides has suspended one neon work from the ceiling and stood another on its end, altering the pressure of the gas inside beyond industrial standards to tweak the texture and quality of their light. A third neon pierces the wall, reiterating the theme of phallic penetration, but, by way of the gravitational pull on the dangling tubes, turns the connoted violence inward on the object itself. A Model for Assisted Ruin I and II consists of two glass rods, leaned against the wall, one intact, the other broken and glued back together. The solid rod hangs back coolly, out of the gallery’s natural light, and, at just more than human scale, is menacing in its normality. Like André Cadere’s barres de bois, for which the artist inserted single impurities into a secret color code, the shattered rod projects quietly varied prisms onto the wall. Recharging the tired signification of the queer rainbow, Hermanides creates a community of objects unified by the fragile but persistent abnormality of form.
