Steve Keister at feature

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Over the past 15 years, the sculptor Steve Keister has amassed an authoritative knowledge of Olmec, Maya and Toltec sculpture, owing primarily to his annual visits to archeological sites in Mexico and Central America. Using castings of consumer-product packaging and information from his fieldwork and digital photographic notes, his works establish a strange limbo of suspended signifiers. Meso-American figuration is repositioned in the present, relieved of its sacral deployment, while Styrofoam cushioning (of the kind used for shipping commodities such as stereo equipment), plastic industrial pails and ordinary egg cartons are "elevated" from utilitarianism into integral sculptural elements.

His most recent show, installed in the gallery's mezzanine, was quietly charged. There were four freestanding sculptures, two reliefs and two segmented lengths of repeated forms that functioned as architectural embellishments. One of these, the vertebraelike Skeletal Frieze (2007), a length of stylized ceramic modules, went across the wall horizontally at picture-molding height. As well as resembling bones, the small jostling shapes, similar but not uniform, also looked like the repeated letters of a severely limited alphabet. Other sculptures were assembled from wood and casts in terra-cotta, cement and plaster, selectively polychromed with acrylic paint. All retained a muffled hallucinogenic quality inherited from their source materials.

Chac Mool (2006), for example, a compact (25-by-30-by-19-inch) reclining figure, is made of naturally brick-red terra-cotta and blue-gray cement, with added touches of turquoise, among other colors. In a statement for the exhibition, Keister cites a text noting that this type of reclining warrior representation is found throughout the region and is known for its "butterfly pectoral," which he represented by an orange-colored terra-cotta breastplate cast from Styrofoam packing material. The figure holds on its lap a form roughly in the shape of a bowl that, historically, might have held the hearts of freshly sacrificed humans. This bowl shape matches the warrior's headgear. As Keister writes, the head's orientation, at a 90-degree angle to its body, is characteristic of this type of figure. Its knees, made of cement molded from a small bucket, are the most surprising parts of the sculpture, and provided this viewer a click of recognition much like the one elicited by the toy car that makes up the head in Picasso's sculpture Baboon with Young; in both, the common object seems to perfectly identify a body part.

Keister is working in a territory similar to that occupied by Philip Taaffe and Tom Sachs, both cross-cultural recyclers. Sachs's work involves replication of familiar consumer objects. Taaffe is as transhistorical as Keister but more wide-ranging. Though I admire all of these artists, I prefer Keister, whose pursuit of rhyming forms that link our culture and an ancient, adjacent one is becoming deeper and more contemplative.

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