Craft has historically found itself thrust into heated disputes relating to the materiality of gendered and racialized labor. More recently, it’s found new currency in the art world, which in turn has developed a proclivity for reducing its makers to simple tropes of identity. In his practice, ektor garcia wrestles with these stratified positions of production with a restless poetry that defies fixed meanings, whether formal or subjective.

For sheer sanguineness, attention to detail, and preternatural craft, the sculpture of Los Angeles-based artist Matt Paweski is tough to beat—at once familiar and yet perfectly strange, if not a little uncanny. The familiarity of the work resides largely in its relationship to utilitarian design, either product or urban, and the sense that what he makes has some kind of function, however unfathomable. For upon first glance, Paweski’s sculptures are evocative of everything from a Cuisinart to a high-end espresso machine to a sort of elaborate industrial tool as seen through the perspective of Constructivism and the table-size works of the late Anthony Caro. But the closer you look, the more inscrutable and absorbingly useless they become—à la Marcel Duchamp or Bruno Munari. This specious impression of utility is aided by the product-line precision with which the works are fashioned, and their seemingly domestic scale. They appear machine-made, but they are for the most part painstakingly handcrafted and painted by the artist himself. Thus they are doubly duplicitous in their artful will to mislead us down a rabbit hole of form, function, and detail.