Helen Marten

One doesn’t so much look at certain sculptures by Helen Marten as visually chew them. At the front of her latest exhibition is a fat squiggle of beveled wood that twists its way down a wall before reaching out at the viewer like a stumpy claw, its crevasses and cleavages resting on wall-mounted pipes (Guild of Pharmacists, 2014). There is something both tasty and metabolic about such a range of surfaces—glossy pale-pinks and shiny creams, which create a sensation of sweets and frosting, as well as bestow the wood itself with a fibrous, carbohydrate quality, as though offered for gnawing on.

The main gallery is largely devoted to variations on two types of work. Lining the walls is a set of leather prints, each featuring a repeated motif—a serene gray cat that balances on its tail on the edge of a cliff—over which Marten has perforated, painted on, and accessorized with add-ons such as a shelf of cartons of healthy, dairy-alternative products that have been modified into birdhouses. These form a backdrop for a populace of six standing sculptures: Each corresponds to the section of the human body from the hip to the ankle in tumescent form, cut off at the waist to form a kind of display tray where the stomach might be.

One of these, a large dusky-pink ceramic sculpture, Candy Mandible, Mrs, 2014, has the curved lines of a pubis and bottom, as well as a frilly, cakey paper serviette at the knee, and is ornamented with the gleeful world of accoutrements that make Marten’s work so gratifying to examine: A pair of white tennis shoes has been covered with crumpled pink foil to form ballet slippers, which join an doily-shaped aluminum litter tray at her side, to match her Marie Antoinette meets British tea lady persona. On the sculpture are rose petals, a scrap of fabric embroidered with cigarettes, and silver confectionary cases filled with what appears to be white glossy glue and Polo mints. Here’s a small taste of Marten’s abundant use of materials, and the way she mangles language and reason, which becomes as pleasingly sticky as gluey sweets in the mouth.