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SLIPPING + SLIDING Working in her studio over the past four decades, Arlene Shechet MFA 78 CR has built a remarkable body of work shaped by opposing forces: mass and motion, solidity and fluidity. “I want my work to look like it’s slipping and sliding and has life,” she said in a wide-ranging interview that ran in T: The New York Times Style Magazine the same day in late February that her solo exhibition Skirts opened at Pace Gallery in NYC. Though the gallery—which represents her—closed less than two weeks later due to COVID-19, the exhibition is viewable online through August 14. Similar tensions of opposites define both her process and work habits, Shechet says. While she’s “incredibly disciplined” when working in her Kingston, NY studio, she doesn’t like “being too goal oriented” and describes the time she devotes to making as wonderfully amorphous, with no beginning or end. “It’s a river... I swim in.” In fact, Shechet never sketches her sculptures in advance, preferring instead the spontaneity of serendipitous discovery. “I like to keep the energy in the art,” she says. “Any time I’ve had a preexisting idea and tried to make it, it’s been a complete failure.” arleneshechet.com
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