Shirley Tse

In her latest exhibition, Los Angeles–based artist Shirley Tse combines her signature medium, plastic, with other materials to draw connections between consumer culture and military technology. Six of the show’s ten sculptures are versions of a textile loom, an early programmable device that foreshadowed the computer. Yet Tse’s looms are human in scale (rather than fit for industry), tempering the sense of technological advancement with the more personal, feminine dimension of handicraft. The most effective pieces hang on the wall like cantilevered paintings, their shredded vinyl tendrils both recalling and mocking drippy abstraction. The brass frame of Algorithm Broken by a Bullet, 2007, is strung with evenly sliced strips of metallic gold vinyl that interlock to form a diagonal slash—a violent interruption of the grid. In Band-Aid Reverie, looping beige strands are at once fleshy and fake, an eerie reminder that plastic bandages are mass-produced substitutes for damaged skin.

Other works are more explicit but equally rich. In Untitled, Tse wraps two rows of small inflatable globes in Styrofoam packing units to form miniature tank treads, neatly conflating globalization, consumerism, and the military. See You at the Bottom of the Sea and Sink like a Submarine both conceal realistically carved jade hearts within elaborate enclosures of organic plastic forms and submarine manufacturing parts. Tse’s unexpected use of jade, with its opaque, plasticlike finish and purported healing properties, borders on kitsch but is perhaps a shamanistic attempt to counter the waste and violence inherent in rampant consumerism and unchecked military escalation.