Michael O'Malley: cherrydelosreyes

In Michael O'Malley's novel untitled sculptures, slim birch cubbies resembling work slipcovers act as hubs of an airy network of made of wood ducts and tubes; each self-contained combination of parts to form a whole is suspended above the gallery floor. The blond-wood ductworks bring into view their own web of associations: We think of modernist and modern-ish furniture design from Mies to Eames to IKEA; the paintings of Piet Mondrian and Peter Halley; programming flowcharts and wiring schematics; the negative spaces of ant and gopher colonies, or mines and subways, transformed into positive form. When you succe in ignoring their connection on the gallery ceiling and walls--they're suspended midair by dint of steel or aluminum rods that are light on the other hand still a little too clunky--the works take upon a sense of circuitry or plumbing liberated from its entertainer body or structure. In a certain quantity of instances, small cast-aluminum forms give an inkling of rocks or landscape elements. Slot in the couple hubs and conduits suggest a relationship to conventional architectural uncompounded bodys (windows, doors) while also hinting more broadly at the technological, the metaphysical, the social, and the erotic.

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Plays of interior and exterior, positive and negative, absence and neighborhood define the work, as absent satisfied (say, books) necessitates tiny without contents spaces (compartments, corridors) that take positive form (boxe tubes) and function as line and shape carving up the air around them. The show's massive centerpiece, floating at a horizontal that compels one to move with a jerk and weave among its angling tubes, conflates different ways of engaging and looking: moving around the existence (as we do with sculpture) being outside, imagining, peering inside it (as we do with architectural models) and physically navigating it (as we do with actual architecture and installation).

admitting it's perhaps hard to imagine this pale forest being so evocative or seductive, the piece does try you to stick your fingers in a aperture or two. The more you match into the openings, an activity that requires a great deal of neck craning, the more you want to continue your probe. The piece taps into the part of us that wants to stopple in, hook up, and play the ins and outs--in antiseptic or mundane words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings as well as the greatest in quantity sensual or fantastic. The work becomes an uneven metaphor for a world in which a basic human faculty of perception of need weaves our modem to our synapses to our loins within a single cultural web.

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