On St. Marks Place in New York’s East Village, above a smattering of smoke shops and cheap pizza joints, two half-nude women in the form of decorative columns set within the facade hold up an apartment building. Most people pass by unaware. But when Alix Vernet spotted them, she was fascinated—and decided she had to cast one in latex.
The resulting sculpture, Lady, Saint Marks, November (2021), resembles a flayed skin with hollowed breasts and a stomach drooping loose, hanging against a backdrop of roughly cut cheesecloth. It looks like a piece of refuse, but one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, as the saying goes, and Vernet’s sculptures tend to consider what really matters in the cluttered New York landscape.
Vernet often makes her art in public view. Working on fire escapes and other outdoor sites, she slathers exteriors of buildings with latex, then allows it to dry to form thin, saggy sheets. Those who spot Vernet creating one of her sculptures might mistake her for a conservator, which makes sense, since she has spent time shadowing city workers charged with the upkeep of public monuments.
In 2020 she came upon a technician power-washing the arch in Washington Square Park. After she spent the day observing him, he invited her up in his cherry picker, and she got a close look as he cleaned off the grime that had accrued over time. Vernet brought with her a small piece of clay that she applied to the arch, taking an imprint of its 19th-century facade. Thus was born the first in a series of sculptures made by casting elements of architectural ornamentation in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Alix Vernet: Lady, Saint Marks, November, 2021.
Photo Dario Lasagni/Courtesy Helena Anrather, New York
To create her work, Vernet seeks permission from superintendents, building managers, and tenants, and asks them about the structures they inhabit. None of those conversations are apparent in Vernet’s sculptures, or in the photographs of her making them that she has exhibited as artworks themselves. But at least one work alludes to the many people involved: a stoneware sculpture that features the word crowds repeated over and over, in reference to an N.H. Pritchard poem. Each of the letters was cast from text on the Brooklyn Public Library’s facade to invoke the crowds that pass through and maintain a municipal building that does not always bear traces of their presence.
An MFA student at the Yale School of Art, Vernet has recently grown interested in how institutions preserve the ages-old objects they own and ensure that the past remains visible to the future. To that end, Time Warner Fragment, Broadway (2023) is a ceramic cast of a New York City manhole cover that Vernet broke into fragments, causing it to look like an ancient artifact. Vernet said the work functions as a “story of the present moment,” even as it appears drastically aged.
