Shana Lutker

In her second solo exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter, “H. Y. S. T. et al.,” Shana Lutker has transformed the gallery into a twenty-first-century dream space. The forms of her sculptures derive from instruments used by Jean-Martin Charcot, the infamous French psychologist who attempted to induce various states of hysteria in his female patients at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Immortalized in early photographs, Charcot’s props resemble medieval torture devices or crude surgical tools. Lutker channels this threat of bodily harm in works such as t.t.t.t.t. (all works 2010), in which double-ended steel skewers slice horizontally through two wooden posts, creating a miniature, spiked ladder that provokes irrational fears or sadistic desires, depending on the viewer.

Lutker’s most compelling works are those that inspire an immediate sense of the uncanny: a shiny, oversize tuning fork whose prongs taper together (Y.), a pair of smooth, asymmetric wooden legs that seem stolen from a mannequin (I.I.), and a leather settee so biomorphic that it looks more like a faceless pair of seated Siamese twins than like domestic furniture (H.). In fact, Lutker designed H. by doubling the original form of Freud’s office chair. This rampant twinning reaches a thrilling high in Susanne Vielmetter’s office, where a flat-screen television displays what appears to be surveillance footage of the exhibition space (H. Y. S. T. et al.). Viewers wonder if they have been watched during their visit, until a life-size, upside-down, cardboard tuning fork saunters across the screen, mimicking their very own ambulations. Are they dreaming? Or going mad? Lutker’s title piece offers no answer, posing instead a chilling question: What’s the difference?