Signal is pleased to present AVER, the first solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Reid Strelow.

AVER consists of three large wooden sculpture and a series of derivative prints: Wheel, Drawing Machine, and Mortise & Tenon.

The sculptures on view recall traditional forms, in shape if not in their monumental scale–a slatted wheel on an axle, the track of a guillotine, a common woodworking joint. But these sculptures are machines, crafted according to their own purposes, shaped as much by their complements as for themselves. Wheel becomes its own printing press, neatly stamping its inked wooden slats, in each of their particularity, along a 30ft horizontal print. The form of Drawing Machine serves as a guide by which the artist repetitively traces a silhouette in even, graphite lines across a doorframe sized sheet of black paper. Mortise, a towering 11 foot monolith, the female component of a fitted woodworking joint, waits alongside Tenon, its overturned complement.

The sculptures and their complements reveal each other– existing for the other, their shape and scale become inevitable, determined by the actions they must complete. Each serves as an index of its complement, of the methodical processes behind their creation, of the intelligence, energy, and devotion that built them by hand, imagined them and set them in motion.

AVER will be on view at Signal from September 21 through October 14, 2012.