In his second solo exhibition at Guild & Greyshkul, Halsey Rodman presents sculptures that emphasize the process and gestures of their own making, inviting the viewer to experience traces of a hovering, charged presence through the act of looking. As in the Hitchcock film from which the show’s title is taken, the enigmatic, objectified non-human is both gazed at and gazes back, turning the gallery space into a site of reciprocal exchange.

Seven hexagonal “eyes” hang on the gallery’s walls. Each is made of a sheet of MDF on which Rodman had painted a colorful, highly abstract acrylic vista, only to then compress it into a sculptural object, whose black, putty-like “seeing eye” bears the traces of the hand that made it, thus linking painterly gesture and sculptural practice, as well as emphasizing the productive gaze between work and viewer. A state of arrested creative flux also informs The Wanderers. A dozen of Rodman’s friends were invited to participate in a day-long event in which each sculpted two sets of Rodman’s feet in clay. The resulting objects, idiosyncratic and yet somehow Platonic, are displayed here on the same table on which Rodman posed and they were sculpted. Serving as a synecdoche of the artist’s body as well as an implied presence of the community that formed them, these objects’ history becomes inseparable from their meaning.

In The Birds, Rodman’s practices combine almost in excess. A gestural, gorgeously colored 8×24 foot painting on MDF has been cut up to form twelve pedestals of various heights, once again collapsing the painterly into the sculptural and forcing an awareness of the tenuous malleability of the space separating viewer from artwork. A dozen pairs of clay feet are arranged on the pedestals and around them, modeled from life by Rodman over the course of twelve one-on-one sculpting sessions with each of the participants in The Wanderers event, bringing the project’s reciprocal emphasis to the fore. In knickknack-like fashion, the pedestals also sport haphazardly colored aluminum foil bowls and gray ashtray-like objects, as well as beer and wine bottles whose oval labels, either original or redone, form staring yellow-iris eyes. In this sculptural extravaganza, elements both form an immediate record of their making as well as offer a reflective comment upon it, inviting us to step into a moment of pure and mysterious creation.

The show also includes a shelf on which an additional, copied set of a dozen pairs of Rodman’s’ friends feet are displayed, two meticulously rendered gouache diagrams which record the two parallel processes of foot sculpting, and two enormous lamps, in which fluorescent lamps are encased by lumps of gray clay, dumb matter opening to reveal a secretive, shimmering light.

-Naomi Fry