Naves, Mario; Now at New York’s Galleries, ‘Everything in the World’ and More, New York Sun, March 22, 2024
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Mario Naves, March 22, 2024
Pat Lay, ‘Nesting Bot X2C2’ (2024). Via Elza Kayal Gallery
Human beings or, rather, the compromises to which humankind is invariably confronted, are at the center of “Multidimensional,” an array of prints, collages, and sculptures by Pat Lay at Elza Kayal Gallery. A veteran of the New York City art scene — she was, lest we forget, featured in the 1975 edition of the Whitney Biennial — Ms. Lay has long been exploring the relationship between the technological and the organic, the machine-made and the hand-crafted.
Ms. Lay’s investigation into artificial intelligence and human integrity precedes our current fixation with the topic. She addresses the issue not with alarm or hyperbole, but with subtlety and wit, particularly in a series of supple ceramic biomorphs that are punctuated by repurposed computer parts.
The best of the bunch is “Nesting Bot X2C2” (2024), in which a bulbous form, glazed a rich burnt orange, is propped up by an accumulation of braces colored a milky white. Here the animism at the center of Ms. Lay’s vision is rendered precarious — as if the scaffolding on which her “hybrid taxonomy” snuggles is as sentient and fragile as its charge.
