A cavernous cubbyhole with a variety of enigmatic gunmetal stalagmites emerges from the relative monotony of the urban backdrop of St. John’s Place in Crown Heights. Janet Goldner’s collection of sculptures, called Zigzags, populate FiveMyles’ exterior space, and while the viewer can enter this space through the gallery, the initial impression of jagged edges, pent-up energy, and the cold solidity of the welded metal objects makes one relieved there is a metal gate between us, the viewer, and them, the sculptures.
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I had just seen a lecture on the archeological excavations in the Taş Tepeler region of Turkey, which includes sites like Göbekli Tepe and Karahantepe, human constructions from over ten thousand years ago, and most of those structures were similarly built from large monolithic elements firmly planted in the ground. Either by the creator’s intention or the vicissitudes of history, these ancient stone dolmens now have the characteristics, like Goldner’s, of looming sculptures rising out of the floor.
This initially seems obvious—sculpture usually rests on the ground, gravity is a force to be contended with, but there is a huge difference in the sense of massing between a figure standing or sitting and an object that is firmly planted in the ground: it is something more primal and permanent. Goldner’s sculptures also have an obdurate self-defensive quality; they don’t want to be messed with, and again, Göbekli Tepe came to mind with its springing jaguars and grinning wild boars with their sharp teeth. Goldner’s Zigzags are assemblages of acute angles, points, and blade-like edges. Even sculptures titled Inside Out, with a fragile metal filigree—decorative cut-outs that expose the thinness of the sculpture’s metal skin—offer a bad scratch as a reward for getting too close.
Entering the space of the Goldner’s sculptures, a selection of differently scaled works placed in poignant dialog and curated by Ruby Lindsey, the alien quality of the metal and its sharpness mellows quickly. Goldner works with specific West African cultural tropes, and her Zigzags are in part inspired by the visual culture of the historical Bamana Empire in Mali (and surrounding countries). In this specific context, the Zigzags can be read as signifiers of the twisted and unexpected path of life. There is an uneasy tension between the very literal representations of the sharp forms rising up from the floor as teeth or stalagmites versus a conceptual and graphic interpretation of the works as perspectival triangles illustrating a road or path receding into the distance.
Goldner’s accumulation of these transitory forms, positioned together in the small but airy space of the exterior gallery, made the show a dramatic clash of personalities rather than a collection of forms acting in unison. A gnome-like pyramid “Triangle” glumly seemed to vie for one’s attention with the more lithe and gangly literal Zigzag “Internal” next to it. Not all of Goldner’s sculptures cling to the literal Zigzag imagery, several pieces entitled Tier small, Tier Medium, and Tier Large utilized circular components for a total impression reminiscent of the pure mechanical beauty of an electrical transformer, but they still play with a variation on the undulating and rhythmical form of the zig-zag, more of a pulse in their case.
The works in Zigzag force the viewer to meditate on the sense of directionality of which sculpture is capable. We often experience this momentum in a distracted state, as in the internally spiraling motion of Serra’s Torqued Ellipses or the vaguely threatening energy of a Ron Bladen piece, but while our body may register the sculpture’s intended motion, we may not notice it at the time, both Serra and Bladen aim to overwhelm. Goldner’s pieces are the perfect scale, just a bit smaller than human, forcing us to stoop or hunch to register their presence. But they whirl and point to a zone far above our heads, catching us in the space from our feet to our crown and prompting an upward gesture. The membranous quality of the metal skin and the welds that the artist feels no need to hide also make these forms more human and less authoritarian than many monolithic forms. The Bamana symbolism of the road receding in front of us adds a conceptual coup de grâce that makes the assembled works less of a crowd of objects and more of a selection of personalities and possibilities—it’s also fun when an artist can flatten her works while simultaneously keeping them very much three dimensional!
All photos courtesy of William Corwin.
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Janet Goldner’s Zigzags at FiveMyles
Curated by ruby lindsey
In the plus/space, Five Myles @fivemyles
Through March 16, 2025
About the writer: Will Corwin is a sculptor and writer from New York. He makes cast metal sculptures and writes regularly for the Brooklyn Rail, Art & Antiques, and ArtPapers. His most recent curatorial project was 60s Synchronicities this past summer at the Collegiale Notre-Dame de Riberac in Perigord, featuring the work of Perle Fine, Marguerite Louppe, and Jann Haworth. His most recent exhibition was a survey of the work of his last ten years of sculpture, at River House Arts in Toledo Ohio, and will be at Geary Gallery in New York this coming April.