Sam Perry, “Folds”

by DeWitt Cheng Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, California

Exhibition continues through September 7, 2025

July 20, 2024

Sam Perry, “Scrunchie,” 2024, wood, 14 x 18 x 12”. All images courtesy of Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco.

For a quarter century Sam Perry’s carved wood sculptures have set a high standard for ingenuity and craftsmanship. For this current exhibition, titled “Folds,” the Oakland artist has created seven medium-sized works — he calls them human-sized — most of which translate the images of fluid fabric and draperies into the hard, heavy medium of oak wood. Perry scavenges the wood from Runnymede Sculpture Farm in Woodside, on the Peninsula, where the artist has served as Director of Installation and Conservation since 1989. Pop art fans will remember Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures of common household objects like fans and phones; Perry might be an ally on the side of witty illusionism against the dogma of “truth to materials,” although in the opposite direction. Perry also riffs off of Aldous Huxley’s 1960s paean to drapery’s hallucinatory suggestiveness to the visionary eye in “The Doors of Perception.” But there is more to this work than Pop Art and altered states of consciousness.

(left) Sam Perry, “Surprise,” 2023, wood, steel base, 72 x 25 x 27”.

(right) Sam Perry, “Coin Toss,” 2022, wood, steel base, 56 x 18 x 16”.

Perry’s abstract sculptures may not refer directly to human beings, but they are evoked through shape and gesture. They also suggest vessels and garments that serve as metaphors for the human condition. Two pieces are anthropocentric, with vertical formats suggestive of standing figures. “Surprise” suggests a standing figure or a piece of wrapped candy, with the twisted wrapping paper at top and bottom serving as head and hip. The twist ties at neck and waist level double as an upraised arm and a belt. “Double Bubble” reverses the composition, with the twin bulbous forms of head and torso separated and defined by a winglike tie-down, suggesting variously a mannequin, an insect, and an hourglass.

Sam Perry, “Double Bubble,” 2023, wood, steel base, 30 x 16 x 16”.

Two sculptures evoke the human presence through metaphor. In “Scrunchie,” the symmetrical hourglass form lies on its side, with the bulbous forms now transformed into skirts, representing a generalized ponytail contained by fabric-covered elastic. “Cage” returns to a vertical format, with a tripod of three curved verticals resembling stylized arms and legs. The whole is held in place by a trio of three-lobed horizontal rings, suggesting a torso or corset.

Sam Perry, “Loose Ends,” 2024, wood, steel base, 31 x 45 x 15”.

Three pieces depict movement rather than constraint. “Let’s Dance” and “Loose Ends” are composed of twisted, looping branches, carved and conjoined to suggest calligraphic arabesques very different from the static, statuesque presences noted above. The coiled, twisted loop of “Let’s Dance” conveys the union of two perfectly synchronized dancers, while the splayed figure of “Loose Ends” suggests incipient disunion and a parting of the ways. “Coin Toss” combines multiple views of a single object — a thick, pierced vertebra-looking coin — rising or falling, and spinning. This image, by itself and taken together with the exhibition as a whole, is an apt metaphor for our current national game of chance and mischance.

DeWitt Cheng is an art writer/critic based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has written for more than twenty years for regional and national publications, in print and online, He has written dozens of catalogue essays for artists, galleries and museums, and is the author of “Inside Out: The Paintings of William Harsh.” In addition, he served as the curator at Stanford Art Spaces from 2013 to 2016, and later Peninsula Museum of Art, from 2017 to 2020.