The title of Michelle Segre’s latest show is “Dawn of the Looney Tune,” and you can be forgiven for thinking that her sculptures sprung from the mind of Chuck Jones or Tex Avery.
Pitched somewhere between Alexander Calder, Jean Arp and Native-American dream catchers, each piece features an irregularly shaped wire frame crisscrossed with brightly colored yarn. But they’re not completely wrapped: Segre left Swiss-cheese–like voids that are webbed with tautly stretched thread. Suspended within these filaments—which are nearly invisible—are bits of detritus, including carrots, mushrooms, pebbles and sponges. Several of these sculptures rise from a base of Styrofoam blocks covered with paint and plaster. A couple of separate small terrariums filled with moldy bread and Plasticine round out the proceedings.
But it’s the larger works that command your attention. Recalling the sort of art you’d see in the background of a midcentury movie—maybe inside Rock Hudson’s bachelor pad—or in a New Yorker cartoon parodying modern art, they exude poetical fun.
Segre’s sculptures exhibit the same sort of absurdist formalism found in the work of Jessica Stockholder and Rachel Harrison, but they eschew the staginess of the former and the cynicism of the latter. They’re content to weave line, form and absence into something like a swatch of space-time fabric riddled with wormholes. As delicate as they are eccentric, these works should put a smile on your face.