Within the architecture of precarity and acrobatics with gravity of Abrams’s work is the spirit of play.
—Carina Evangelista
Balancing Acts, the first solo exhibition of Cranbrook Academy of Art alumna and renowned art, architecture and design critic Janet Abrams, comprises over a dozen sculptures that put clay in conversation with diverse materials-including steel, copper, rawhide, rubber, and wood. The show tracks Abrams's evolving studies of balance, gravity, and precariousness. Drawing inspiration from the work of 20th-century sculptors such as Alexander Calder, Ruth Duckworth, Lucio Fontana, Eva Hesse, Barbara Hepworth, and Ruth Vollmer, her sculptures set opacity and weight in contrast to translucency and levity and reject the convention that ceramic artifacts must be earth- or pedestal- bound. Forms and materials are brought together in compositions that seem to harness kinetic energy, conveying a frisson of risk-a condition she describes as "a metaphor for the precariousness of life itself."
