The Paula Cooper Gallery will present an exhibition of new work by Meg Webster, opening February 23 and running through March 22, 2008, at 465 West 23rd Street. This will be the artist’s first show in New York since 2000.

In several works in the exhibition, Webster extends her practice of revisiting the vocabulary of minimal sculpture to explore the potential of geometric forms to become vessels, often for organic or industrial materials. In Contained Asphalt, for example, the viewer is confronted with a chest-high triangular column of asphalt. Nose Cone Vessel is a five-foot stainless steel conic cylinder filled to the brim with water; and, while Titanium Hemisphere does not contain any material per se, its bowl-shaped hollowness suggests the capacity to hold or to enfold.

The exhibition also includes Melted Weapon Box, a cubic steel box containing an aluminum cube, both made from the constituent materials of a melted M4 assault rifle. With Bear, an electronic frame displaying found images of polar bears, Webster turns to a meditation about nature, birth and extinction as mediated by visual technology, a reflection she had initiated in 1997 with a pared-down TV monitor displaying a video of a lamb being born.