ART-PRESENTATION: Cal Lane-Disobedient Virtues

Cal Lane is a sculptor known for turning ordinary objects into lacy artworks. To date, her pieces stand alone in capturing a delicacy and intricacy quite apart from her closest contemporaries. Lane’s tapestries, cut into harsh and often preternaturally large steel and iron structures, are sensual, alluring and deeply effeminate.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Art Mûr Archive

Having spent much of her early life as a hairdresser in her mother’s salon in Vancouver Island Cal Lane soon became interested in exploring gender roles and Conceptual Art. “Disobedient Virtues” her debut European solo exhibition is on presentation at Art Mûr Leipzig. Cal Lane works in a series of “Industrial Doilies”, producing works that use contradiction to create an empathetic form. Lane imparts highly industrial materials with touches of delicacy, adding filigree to car parts, oil tanks, and shovels with a blowtorch. Her chosen patterns also exist on another level, their compositions inspired by those used in religious ceremonies such as weddings, christenings, and funerals. Lane’s use of lace simultaneously hides and exposes the materials in which she chooses to work, revealing and covering up tough materials with delicate pattern. With layers of juxtaposed binaries, Lane’s work is paradoxical: feminine and masculine associations play against each other, the techniques of industry and handicraft meet, delicate designs overtake durable materials and positive and negative spaces create a beautiful play of light and shadow on the surrounding floor and walls. By merging the high art connotations of sculpture with the aesthetic of craft, Lane plays with gendered assumptions. She says: “I am a woman and that is a certain category that comes with a certain social history and stereotypes…I like to work with and against these social/cultural expectations”. By performing through such conventions, her work shows the possibilities of visual language when materials are manipulated in uncharacteristic ways.

Info: Art Mûr Leipzig, Spinnereistraße 7, Leipzig, Duration: 10/9-8/10/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-18:00, http://artmur.com