MODUS OPERANDI, TOMASHI JACKSON AND ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: THE CATCH ONE, PAINT YOUR LIFE!, and A LINE, A SHAPE, A TOOL

Framed via a commissioned short story by Times critic and novelist Will Heinrich, the narrative  functions almost as a fifth artist in this intoxicatingly chaotic exhibition of four sculptors. The show’s internal logic suggests that three-dimensional objects, by virtue of their material reality, inevitably carry traces of the histories embedded in their making. Unlike paint, a neutral medium awaiting transformation, sculpture starts as a thing in the world, no different from a chair. Materials arrive burdened with other functional uses and associations, whether in the oil-drum lids or debris assembled throughout A Line a Shape, A Tool.

Heinrich’s story unfolds through the voice of an anxious narrator haunted by recurring forms: a boat becomes a vulva; shapes seem forever changing. He wonders whether his compulsive rearranging of objects merely imitates what nature itself does without intentionality “Every morning I awoke with a new theory,” he writes. “First my body was made of atoms. Then it was an idea in the mind of God. Then instead of ‘God’ I said ‘deus sive natura.’”

The new Geary space quietly amplifies these concerns. Its exposed wooden columns and architectural irregularities domesticate some of the exhibition’s barely controlled chaos, especially in Russell Maltz’s massive ACCU-FLO (2026), a collapsed mound of lumber, plywood, and paint that resembles the aftermath of a construction project. Maltz introduces just enough formal intervention in a shifting rectangle of bright orange paint — to transform quotidian debris into sculpture. The point is reinforced by his accompanying photographs of construction sites presented as found sculpture.

William Corwin contributes cast-iron tables, boats, and ladders whose dense physicality and almost oppressive gravity most directly embody Heinrich’s shape-haunted fictional universe.

If Maltz and Corwin operate in a materially register, Sun You offers something closer to a Mozartian counterpoint: delicate balances of floating forms that seem capable of lifting off their pedestals entirely, fragments of color suspended on thin wires.

Pooneh Maghazehe proves the exhibition’s most restlessly inventive presence. Her Bird Trick, incorporating found objects like ceiling jack and kiddie pool, becomes the show’s most captivating moment — an unlikely convergence of functional objects transformed into something strange, theatrical, and psychologically charged just on the edge the uncanny.  The four artists are deployed in each of the galleries three spaces in such a way as to draw us into an anxious viewing experience aligned with the fictive wandering from one puzzling object to the next.  — Bill Arning