Placing the Unplaceable; Touching the Untouchable
The Arts League
4226 Spruce St.
Philadelphia
Showing May 9 - June 3, 2025
Seen May 25
The best way to describe the exterior of a hornets’ nest is probably as an ugly lump of fear-inducing paper-mache. It’s the interiors of such shelters — full of tessellating, hexagonal tunnels — that usually steal the architectural show.
Abbey Lakey’s sculptures of what appear to be blown-up hornet hives, naturally titled “Nests,” are an ode to the black box power of building a facade. Currently on display at the Arts League’s latest show, “Placing the Unplaceable; Touching the Untouchable,” the structures showcase the role of ritual in raising mystery and meaning.
The three “nests” are by no means beautiful to look at. Lakey built them by stacking strips of cardboard over one another and employing abaca fiber, beeswax, charcoal and spray paint for adhesion and color. The motivation for the project is clearly not aesthetics or functionality — unlike with most “nests” built by people and animals — but rather the poetry of repetition.
Beyond Lakey's work, the broader exhibit explores why we are compelled towards routine. Most of the artworks feature inherently redundant artistic techniques: sewing, carving, knotting or weaving. Lakey’s piece, in particular, fixates on our common quest for shelter as well as the fundamental uncertainty of life that underlies our desire for mundane stability.
Drawing attention to the relationship between art and shelter makes honest sense; after all, when most people think of the earliest human images, they likely think of cave drawings. Aesthetic impulses on the part of animals also usually appear as part of construction; pigs, for example, are known for carrying flowers in from the fields to decorate their pens while Bowerbirds collect colorful litter to lure mates into their beds with yard art.
Other artists featured in the show appear interested in the integration of natural beauty into structure. Hanging from the walls are all sorts of delicate tapestries, like pink cobwebs of yarn or walls of tissue paper mirroring stained glass (pictured above). This only helps Lakey’s abrupt installation of misshapen and mummified “nests” stand out. The nests, which gape open on one end like ruptured cocoons, are almost cavernous; their blackened entryways pull us in like ever-expanding pupils.
On one hand, Lakey seems to argue that externalities count only so far as they orient our interest towards what lies beneath the surface. Crack open an old hornets' nest and you’ll find a spellbinding maze within. However, there’s no such complexity within Lakey’s sculptures.
The outside half of hornet homes actually take a lot of work to build. Hornets spend up to six months drafting the drab walls to their houses. The grey "paper-mache" look I described earlier is in part due to the fact that hornets make their own kind of paper product by chewing up wood fibers and cementing them together with their own spit in order to shield their hives from the outside world.
So on the other hand, we could see Lakey’s bizarre gallery contribution as a microcosm of the labor that goes into the most unattractive sides of shelter. Maybe the “inside” is not truth and wonder, but plain emptiness. In the absence of apparent meaning, we must still go through the banalities of daily life. It’s through stacking cardboard and chewing wood that we dig ourselves deeper into the maze of existence. What’s alluring about the maze is not the laborious sensitivity of it all, but rather the mystery of its own making.
