Encountering the work of Robert Therrien is like plunging down the rabbit hole to Wonderland: Things and settings are at once familiar and radically reconfigured thanks, most often, to tweaks in scale and perspective in which otherwise ordinary chairs and tables, for example, loom alarmingly overhead. Therrien relies on the simplest of perceptual shifts that, when backed by flawless production values, lands a direct physical and psychological punch. This solo exhibition (the L.A. sculptor’s first New York outing in 10 years) revolves around three self-contained rooms that transform the gallery’s space into a trio of opaque, dreamlike tableaux.
Each of these curious installations appears to have been torn from some other, larger building, evoking the unsettling architectural stunt of disassembling an old structure in one country, only to reconstruct it in another after transporting its components over a vast distance. (Two of the arrangements even look like shipping containers from outside.)
One piece consists of a dark wood-paneled drawing room mysteriously furnished with a ceiling-mounted trap door. A second reproduces a sterile institutional corridor, while a third features a greenhouse made of plastic and reclaimed glass. Extra-large representations of objects as vastly different as oil cans and raindrops, along a few somewhat more allusive works on paper, round out a show that’s uncanny, selfie-ready fun.