Artseen: William Corwin
I begin with an adulatory character sketch: tall, handsome, well-spoken, an articulate writer and an artist with an archeological-cum-anthropological creative bent who graduated from Princeton University (where he studied architecture), William Corwin is dapper in an “old world” kind of way. That was my impression upon meeting him during the opening of his solo show Things: Wheels, Ladders, Teeth, Alps, Gods, Boats, Etc. at Geary Contemporary in Millerton, featuring cast metal sculptures made during the last decade of his practice.
Dressed in a classic wool tweed blazer, Corwin graciously chatted with guests about his sand casts and the two-part mold process that yields the work as they hovered over rusty-looking sculptures of mythical Viking rafts on a low plinth. I heard Corwin mention “boats as metaphors in every culture” that provide a way to “sail into the hereafter” just before I interrupted his confab (apologies to fellow artists Daniel Giordano and Yura Adams for their generosity in that moment). Astute additions to Corwin’s spoken comments are written by Lucy Lippard in her essay “Will Corwin’s Remnants and Reminders” where she states: “The boat can be a protective womb, a fateful rescue, or a fragile prediction of disaster” and Karen Wilkin’s mention of his ship-vessels that “at once evoked the solemnity of ancient burial rites and the intimacy of toys” (both essays found in the exhibition catalogue).
We entertained a dynamic swath of intellectual ground before Corwin departed to the potluck gathering for his adjoining exhibition at nearby Re Institute. During that brief conversation I asked him to highlight one artwork for my review. He explained that the positioning of the works around the room is meant to be “a walk” from object to object as he led me to Artemis Table 1 (2024) and shared a bit about how the pieces fit together and give the impression of a funeral ship with interlocking joints, thus “technically a cast iron assemblage,” in his words.
After hearing his ideas, I lingered to absorb Corwin’s world, allowing his muscular quasi sci-fi incarnations to communicate on their own terms. These curious sculptures appear to morph as they reflect a hybrid symbolism of sorts, such as Large Artemis 1 (2024), a slender silver figure-like form with a galactic look and protruding breasts that cascade down, and Small Artemis 2 (2023), a skinny silver shape home to a ladder embedded inside it while breasts sprout from the middle (deflating balloon-ish breasts and lanky ladders as recurring Corwin themes, to say nothing of Artemis and her legacy as the Goddess of nature, childbirth, wildlife, archery and so forth). Other works such as Artemis Fortuna (2025) exude a sense of play between the multiple-breasted-archetype and familiar objects, in this case a wheel with eight spokes (which I interpret as a nod to Buddha’s drawing of a wheel in the sand with respect to the “Gods” aspect of the elongated title for this show).
I headed over to the Re Institute to encounter Corwin’s “Mountains” on the second floor of this rustic barn-turned-gallery space (which afforded me the joy of seeing the Early Circles installation on the way upstairs, featuring the large upcycled cardboard mandalas by Re Institute founder Henry Klimowicz). In the printed take-away for this show, Corwin asks “What is the difference between a rock and a mountain?” to set the tone for his site-specific installation that features a long row of misshapen forms meant to look like a miniature mountain range that cuts the room into several regions. The rugged line of bumpy ridges resounds with Corwin’s intended concept for this work: “I am less interested in some kind of geologic statement [than] thinking about what we think mountains are,” he comments. Corwin’s statement goes on to cite his time at an artist residency in Switzerland that afforded hours of train rides to merely look at mountains for the pleasure of it. Indeed, to be with Corwin’s menagerie of mountains, wheels, ladders, alps, gods, boats, and other sculptural ontologies is to be seduced into his pleasing artistic ‘hereafter’ after all.