Artist Andy Coolquitt patches together an entire universe out of found material that's accumulated at his house in Texas. Whether hanging on the wall or suspended low in the middle of the space, the lamps included in this group show are but a small quotation from his entropic artistic project. Constructed from found pieces of metal, these functional sculptures illuminate themselves more than the space in which they reside. In a second room, viewers encounter sculptures by Frank Haines and works on paper by William J. O’Brien. Whereas Coolquitt flirts with a plumber’s formalism, Haines is on the trail of a geometric ordering principle, one that at times verges on the mystical. A hexagonal installation in the cellar, placed in front of a wall lit with colored light, reminds one of a witch’s cave; upstairs, an agglomeration of thirteen photographs in shaped frames features at its center the image of a painted eye. O’Brien’s abstract and figurative drawings exhibit a deeply intuitive visual language of human faces and gestures, and they evoke the work of Jonathan Meese. Each of these three American artists samples everyday themes and forms to create his own personal cosmos.––Sabine Vogel

Just inside the door during Andy Coolquitt’s recent show, a rolled-up length of foam offered a comfortable seat. Leaning against the walls, as if ready to be picked up and used, were a broom handle, a table leg and some wooden slats. Stretching wall to wall near the ceiling was a pole made of broom handles. None of these was an artwork; rather, they were supplemen tary to the works on view. Some, Cooley explained to me, might become works. Others are found objects that look much like Coolquitt’s bricolage sculp tures. Declining to label the latter group readymades, the artist prefers to call them “somebody-mades.” The dense installation, which packed into one small room almost two dozen artworks (all created since 2008) and as many other objects, lent a casual air to already play ful sculptures that incorporate discarded cigarette lighters (many found at crack-smoking havens, according to Claire Barliant’s catalogue essay), plastic and metal pipe, zip-lock bags and the like.

A number of the works incorporate functioning lightbulbs, some situated on poles built from segments of variously colored metal, so they have the look of a rough-edged Andre Cadere sculpture having a bright idea. “Lamps” may be a misnomer, though: two works that sport bulbs lack power cords; the working bulbs are of low wattage, and they sometimes rest on the floor, minimizing functional ity. Coolquitt’s “lamps” serve better as metaphors for function (or dysfunction), warmth, illumination and inspiration.

The show’s title, “We Care About You,” not only spoofs customer-service lan guage but also evokes the artist’s hope that his work can provide assistance and comfort—a hope rooted in Allan Kaprow’s philosophy that any human activity can be art, and by Coolquitt’s own stint as a social worker. Perhaps the clearest embodiment of this senti ment is A nice soft place for meeting people, a velour-covered pad, about a foot thick and three feet to a side, that hangs on the wall, inviting one to lean against it. This and other works recall the fabric paintings of Blinky Palermo, who, as Barliant points out, aspired to be a decorator as much as an art ist. Other objects, if used, would prove unwieldy at best. Against a wall in the back room was a 12-foot-long piece of rebar with a crayon taped perpendicu larly to its middle: a tool for two people to draw together, each holding one end. Any attempt at use would doubtless be comically awkward, as with Franz West’s “Adaptives”—ungainly, manipu lable sculptures that tend to highlight the pathos of the human condition.

While he hopes art can provide succor, Coolquitt is hardly pious. Chair consists of a thin slat of wood that rests against the wall, with a wooden hand, its third finger extended, attached at about the height where it might provide a (painful) perch. Taken together, Coolquitt’s work strikes a chord that combines the comfy foam stool by the door and the middle-finger seat: solicitous but often sardonic, it’s somewhere between a friendly pat on the back and a rude finger up the ass.––Brian Boucher

Immediately entering Andy Coolquitt’s intimate solo show at Lisa Cooley, the gallery goer comes face-to-face with a thin assemblage of suspended metal rods in the shape of a wide-angled upside down “V” with fat light-bulbs emanating a soft glow out each end. The metal rods, which taper gradually, are alternatively painted red, off-white and blue, making the work, hold on to me (2008), seem a distant metallic and electric cousin to a Broodthaers (elbow) bone. Whether or not this work, along with the rest of the show, is as political is a question worth pondering.

Not in question is the beautiful and delicate tension Coolquitt’s various light-bulb structures evoke. Of the 15 works on display, 7 are variations of the one described above. The crucial difference is their positioning in the gallery. Unlike the suspended hold on to me, the rest are propped up throughout the space. The resulting contact between the light bulbs, the wall—and in some cases the floor or the ceiling—is truly affective. In wink wink (2008), two metal rods with light-bulbs at each end casually lean against the wall and stand on the floor. There is nothing casual, however, about the resulting tension: the weight of one end presses down on its light source, as if its bulb might burst at any moment, while the opposite end counteracts this tension in a flush, buoyant relationship with the wall.

In the middle of the gallery, a single metal rod, 1 thru 10 (2008), curves slightly as it rises from the floor to make light-bulb contact with the ceiling. Off to the side and leaning against the wall is the work from which the show draws its title, iight (2008), a “U” shaped variant of hold on to me. On the other side, 21st century agressive carpet growth (2008), is a single rod draped by an oppressively dingy carpet with light-bulbs bracing both ends. In each case, there is a play of contact between the work and the physical space, a play that makes the viewer wonder whether the illuminative energy comes from inside the work, or is somehow magically activated by the contact itself: in short, a play between materiality and poetry.

All the works are bricolages of mundane found objects, but not all are plug-in-able. Coolquitt includes rods with irreverently sculpted middle fingers at each end, a stout block of wood masked by a paper bag, and a liquid-filled malt liqueur bottle with a chain of drinking straws jutting out the mouth and rising up in the air, just to name a few. Balancing out the show, these objects seem to be props in a ritual long-since forgotten, or private meanings long-since inaccessible. Or, more simply, they are objects normally relegated to dumpsters and basements now salvaged and given renewed meaning. In a time of heightening eco-politics, this logic of recycling should seem timely. And if this review began with a begged political question, the answer might come in the form of this litter(al) return of repressed objects, and in the form of light-bulb sculptures that seem to sustain themselves through connections and currents of energy endlessly looping from one end to the other. Coolquitt’s work may very well be at once a material display and poetic polemic for clean, renewable energies, with, quite naturally, no drilling involved.––Arnaud Gerspacher is pursuing his Ph.D. in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York.

In Andy Coolquitt’s first show at Lisa Cooley, in 2008, he carefully leaned a handful of tall, thin silver and yellow metal poles against the gallery's walls. Some were balanced on light bulbs; one was propped gingerly on a model of a hand extending its middle finger. The space felt like a somber, slightly fragile pagan sanctuary. For this second outing, Coolquitt has transformed it space into a humming party hall.

Coolquitt’s poles have returned, but they line the full expanse of the walls this time, and ooze color: fluorescent greens, reds, pinks, and oranges. BBBBBBBBBBOBBBBBBBBBB’s flickering field of blue arrives courtesy of Bic lighters embedded in a ceramic plank. They leap off the floor too, as in 0+0 (2009), which reaches from wall to ceiling. Its wrapped with black carpet and crossed with another white pole bearing two light bulbs, forming a ghostly cross.

Elsewhere, Coolquitt simply sets found objects in rows, letting associations form, acting like a more precocious, more abstruse Haim Steinbach. In TEMP/PERM (2010), he offers a roll of paper, two of those rude fingers, another lighter, and a small assortment of other items around a pink board that he has tethered to the ceiling by two strings. As in most of Coolquitt’s work, any meaning is inscrutable, but it’s a serious visual pleasure.

There are a few less-characteristic works on display as well. A nice soft place for meeting people is a rectangular cube covered with a velvety lilac-cored fabric and mounted low on the wall, just above the floor on which it could actually be used to serve its function. A dirty, abused ball sits off to its side. It is a disquieting addition: these works may be fun, relatively light-hearted playthings, Coolquitt reminds us, but it would be unwise to get too comfortable.
Coolquitt has also adorned a semispherical light with a curly blonde wig to create one wall-mounted sculpture — a goofy, loving tribute to Craig Kauffman’s vacuum-formed Plexiglas sculptures that one wishes Kauffman could have lived to see. It's enough to decide that the show's title — however bizarre (is that a majestic plural?) — is undoubtedly true.––Andrew Russeth

In his exuberant second solo show on the Lower East Side, Andy Coolquitt reconciles Minimalism’s control-freak tendencies with an appreciation of awkwardness and imperfection. Using broom handles, plastic straws and other found objects, sometimes wired to light bulbs, he turns out serial objects with a D.I.Y. twist.

Several staffs made from pipe segments recall the multicolored wooden “Barres” of Andre Cadere, until you see the rust and solder. Other works made with striped fabric are closer in spirit to Blinky Palermo, or maybe Jim Lambie.

As in Mr. Lambie’s work, color redeems a couple of constructions that aren’t otherwise all that complex — in particular, two towers of stacked cigarette lighters. One consists of translucent yellow and orange lighters laid end to end and looks like a tube of neon. The other, opaque blue lighters glued side by side to a strip of clear acrylic, evokes ancient Egyptian inlays of turquoise and lapis lazuli.

Mr. Coolquitt’s sculptures derive some of their power from a hectic, aggressive installation. Most of the bars and rods lean against the wall, but some protrude from it or form a kind of barrier. Several pieces double as floor lamps or overhead lighting fixtures.

Another work, a square-shape wall relief upholstered in a soft pale-blue fabric, has a purely social function: it’s titled “A nice soft place for meeting people.” Think of it as Minimalism’s warm and fuzzy side. ––Karen Rosenberg

Since moving to New York in 2002, Andy Coolquitt, a native Texan, quickly adopted the urban practice of scavenging curbside trash, at times working directly in the street to create pieces from discarded grannie carts, deodorant cans, and vacuum cleaners.  His work conjures dumpsters more than galleries, the results not so much recycled as re-appropriated. His recent solo show, “iight,” at Lisa Cooley Fine Art, emphasized light and electricity. Pieces like wink wink and 21st century Aggressive Carpet Growth (a wooden pole tipped with delicate light and swaddled in soiled carpeting) were at once streetwise and fragile, their gruff and grimy exteriors belying their precarious and fraught balance. Some of the reedy sculptures were carefully perched atop their lit bulbs; others leant against the gallery walls as if inebriated.

Referencing both Walter DeMaria and Dieter Roth in his work, and emphasizing a decidedly Duchampian outlook, Coolquitt deploys everyday objects so that they might “suddenly, be rendered dysfunctional.” His own home in east Austin bursts with salvaged sculpture and cobbled color, itself a living work that provides for Coolquitt and cohorts, “an alternative to institutional community,” as he describes it.

Finishing up pieces for his show at the Texas Biennial, Coolquitt clarifies that the confluence of art and home in his new work doesn’t stem from the necessity of starving artists living in their studio; he draws inspiration from more temporary living spaces. “I’m not interested in crack houses per se, [but rather] the residue of a gathering of people the night before who came together to share the pipe,” he says. “There is always an this intensely lame attempt at domestication. A piece of cardboard placed on the ground or against a wall to create a primitive sofa- creating comfort through collection and object fetishization.”––Andy Beta

"Anyone who came of age in an American suburb has a particular understanding of those sites of delinquency that are curiously adjacent to places of industry and growth: banks of canals, strip mall loading docks, construction sites after dark. These are some of the sites that inspire the Austin, Texas–based artist Andy Coolquitt. After collecting detritus from these liminal areas in cities such as Miami, Baltimore, and Portland, Oregon, and then slightly altering his finds, Coolquitt presents the resulting works in a way that might be best described as sculpture in an abandoned field.

For his current exhibition, the dirty Minimalist has embarked on the largest sculpture he has made in the past ten years:+, 2011. The basis of the show is a large X made of four sheets of Plexiglas. These panels divide the gallery into four quadrants, within which Coolquitt has assembled his dowry of scavenged items: crack pipes, broken mops, brown-bagged malt liquor, water-damaged paperbacks (titles include Michael Crichton’s Timeline and Stephen Davis’s Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga). The items, long having sacrificed use-value to disrepair, take on a subcultural mysticism. A pillar of old buckets, a staff of glued cigarette lighters, and even the division of the room into four sections all suggest a paganism of teenage Satanists.

Each section appears as a composition in and of itself, but then one begins to see formal echoes through the Plexiglas, which at once reflects the objects in the viewer’s quadrant and reveals similar arrangements in the other three. This structural transparency at once recalls Duchamp’s Large Glass and Dan Graham’s architectural pavilions, while the show also channels the monumentality and industry of Richard Serra’s large-scale sheet metal sculptures. Standing near the Plexiglas is also a daunting task once one notices that it’s propped up by old broomsticks. This precariousness engages the body not with Serra’s promise of sublime annihilation but with the threat of an industrial accident resulting in boredom and workers’ comp, a distinctly suburban disorder."-- Hunter Braithwaite