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Howard House is pleased to present New Sculpture Survey, showcasing recent work by eight artists, exploring current trends and directions in the field of three-dimensional work.

Diem Chau and Jason Wood investigate the overlap between sculpture and drawing by using the actual drawing tools as building blocks for their figurative sculptures. Chau's grouping of exquisitely carved Crayola crayons explores notions of identity and childhood innocence. The tiny figures take on an almost eerie quality as they stand in mass, still and fragile and almost heartbreakingly colorful. Jason Wood makes life-size figures from hundreds of pencils or pickup sticks. Here wood is made flesh, pointy and painful, conjuring up images of a fakir's bed of nails and a Lilliputian land of bizarre figuration.

Ben Chickadel's sculptures are pushed and twisted by gravity, morphing the delicately cut paper into bodily shapes and trembling armor. A pile of pink bones cast shadows on the wall, and a big yellow paper Hummer rests precariously between weight and weightlessness, military might becoming an impossibly drooping paper tiger. Through a ladder held up by cantilever, Sean M. Johnson's own bi-racial identity is dissected. We are drawn in, fascinated by his defiance of gravity, yet our exploratory excitement is mixed with discomfort as the ladder hovers on the verge of collapse and destruction.

Jon Haddock translates news stories into cartoony polymer clay sculptures in his “cartoon violence” series. The decapitated head of an assassinated suicide bomber lies in a pool of blood, and a sleazy Roman Polanski photographs his young muse, frozen in a cat-and-mouse game of sexual power play and violence. Erik Geschke in his stunning exploding sculpture makes us pause to reflect on the physical manifestation of a moment stopped in its tracks.

Jenny Heishman's work pushes the notion of figuration through the use of multiple-views and layers of transparence. The act of viewing moves from the realm of the passive, forcing us to actively figure out what is being seen. Michael O'Malley similarly throws the viewer off kilter by his unconventional use of materials. O'Malley transforms common building materials into sculpture that vacillates between fantastic representations and unconventional, material presence, placing itself somewhere between the architectural and the organic, the decorative and the functional.