There is something peculiar about the beginning of a party, the conspicuous amounts of empty space fostering an ambient anticipation of what will come, who will arrive, and how I, you, or we will respond. It’s this sort of social anxiety that one encounters here, where Ragen Moss’s bulbous, anthropomorphic sculptures are currently on view.

Constructed with polyethylene, aluminum, steel hardware—and adorned with acrylic paint—Moss’s forms, which hang from the gallery’s ceiling, are both bionic and voluptuous. Indeed, the works’ bodily contours are exaggerated precisely through the rigidity of the materials employed (however, a number of their indentations suggest a certain malleability as well). À la Umberto Boccioni, her characters seem transitory, both full of air and not, inhaling and exhaling. Although they encourage a certain fasciation with surface tension, Moss’s sculptures are spatially dynamic. Senior Borrower (with Mezzanine Borrower), all works 2019, for example, features a range of felicitous decoration—including stars, a Lamborghini logo, and written text—that partially obscures a world behind its translucent plastic skin. “Interiority” becomes hypostasized, no longer a metaphysical inwardness but rather the spatial sediment of Moss’s sculpting.

Not all the sculptures should be considered individually, however. Some, like Puritan (with hellcat Heart) and Hellcat (with puritan Heart), are physically linked, their swapped hearts suggesting an amorous entanglement as well. Unteachables I (with double Hearts) and Unteachables II (with double Hearts) serve as the show’s more established couples, each pair gently swaying next to each other. The gallery becomes the arena in which these relationships play out, Moss’s sculptures carving out space both social and physical, beyond and within their evocative forms, charting this party’s beguiling cartography.

— Blake Oetting