Charles Long, “paradigm lost”

Long before it became something of a fashion, Charles Long mined the tropes of 20th-century modernism to create surreal sculptures whose idiosyncrasies spoke to a deep art-historical knowledge. His latest pieces, based on the forms of trees felled by rising temperatures, effect an unlikely melding of climate change and human anatomy by replacing the concentric rings usually found in logs with a cross-section of the penis.