Elisa D'Arrigo at Elizabeth Harris - New York

There is nothing tricky about Elisa D'Arrigo's sculptures. The effort involved in their creation is abundantly evident, from the painstakingly hand-stitched seams that hold their cloth units together, to their gently tumbled placement on walls and floor. Yet they make a distinctly uncanny impression, as if we were looking at them in a warped mirror, or through a fevered haze.

The effect is especially pronounced in the two biggest works, Inside Out #11 and Inside Out #12. Sweeping grandly from wall to floor, these sculptures are assembled, like the others shown, from strips of cloth remnants assembled into rough circles and ovals, stiffened with acrylic medium and sewn together. Inside Out #11 is dyed to various shades of blue, its top-heavy surge suggesting a cresting wave; #12, in a spectrum of rich aqueous greens, evokes a vast, dreamy ball gown made of sea wrack. Indeed, bits of this gown's train seem to have broken apart on the floor, where individual bubblelike cloth rounds come to rest individually, like foam on the shore. But for all their romance there is also a measure of toughness to these sculptures, the stitching so clearly laborious, the cloth so rigid. And the powerful sense of spatial distortion, which results from the way the units' shapes progress from vertically elongated ovals at the top to near circles at the bottom, makes an appeal on strictly perceptual, not emotional, terms.

Other sculptures explicitly reference organic structure, with cloth cells suggesting animal tissue under a microscope or a teeming drop of water. The wall-mounted Cross Section #2 is a rosy pink; the color deepens as the cells recede, making it seem luminously alive, though the squared-off shape of the cells also hints at social structures--a hive, or a modular residence. Either way, the subtle convexity of the whole, which bows outward in the middle as if holding its breath, supports the feeling of animation. The same is true of the effervescent Cross Section #1, in which the bubbly, buoyant cells are almost circular, and blue. Alone among these pieces, Budding #6 rests entirely on the floor, its rusty-looking, roughly hemispheric units surging to a lopsided peak. In its constituent parts and in sum, the sculpture suggests bowls, yurtlike dwellings and other primitive forms related to shelter and sustenance. But there's also a hint of humor in its wavelike tumult that is present in the other pieces here as well.

D'Arrigo, who has been making sculpture based on organic form for more than 15 years, cites the influence in her current work of a grotto in the Bronx, where kitsch and piety mingle freely. The connection can be seen in the ritual devotion her sculpture requires, and in the imaginative flights, from the rapturous to the mundane, that it encourages.

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