NYAB Event - Rebecca Welz "Steel Nets"

Rebecca Welz "Steel Nets"

June Kelly Gallery

This event has ended.

Steel Nets, an exhibition of powerful steel net-like sculptures by Rebecca Welz that hang from the ceiling or jut from the wall, will open at the June Kelly Gallery on December 17.

Welz over the past years has developed a distinctive style in which her sculpture often crosses boundaries and challenges the limitations of her material. These new pieces continue that approach.

In earlier work, the artist integrated steel rods as harmonious elements to support an aggregation of painted steel planes. In this current body of work, Welz has used the flexibility of the steel to form kinetic three-dimensional shapes that evoke the sense of swirling motion and circulating energy.

Welz describes her sculpture’s interlocking structure as “strong with loops distorted by heat, bending as to suggest they once were shiny and new but now have been found after years of use.” The complex groupings of loops, small tangled with large, and thick with thin, appear, at first, chaotic, she notes. But there is order in the repetitious geometry within the groupings.

Her pieces, she says, “are infinitely variable; the loops can be shifted and turned within their connecting loops to change the configuration. They are about time, about the mutability of history and about the variability of systems that we live within. They are also about the freedom of space within the lines of structure.”

Welz entitles the exhibition Steel Nets after the appearance of the steel when the pieces are disengaged from the hanging hooks and they “collapse into a mound of material like fishing nets on the shore,” she says. “These nets are used to hold and capture with uniform openings smaller than the intended catch. They are open and variable, so the catch could swim or float through, in and around the spaces.”

She adds that her sculptures also have “the character of large see-through drawings,… lines of varying thicknesses of welded steel, blackened and bent, contorted and changed by time with unknown histories.”