Galleries: Timothy Belknap turns everyday objects into sculpture

Why lay out cash for bronze, marble, steel, or pecky cypress when you can use the lawn mower?

At Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art, sculptor Timothy Belknap has done just that in "Mowing Towards Entropy," taking the quintessential American machine, painting it pristine white, and suspending a Calder-ish mobile of colorful plastic parts from the ceiling above. It's a vision of a lawn mower in rebellion, spewing its insides out instead of chomping up grass - and of the American dream of the perfect manicured lawn blown to smithereens.

In his "Kake" sculptures, Belknap conflates three American icons into household hazards at once. Cakes, the Fourth of July, and Wayne Thiebaud's iconic paintings of cakes resonate in these clever constructions of fireworks presented on glass cake pedestals (Big Boom-Kake, by far the largest of this series, sits on the gallery's floor and would be more impressive on a low, white sculpture pedestal).

I'm guessing that Belknap's macabre, but also strangely comical pneumatic sculpture, Unlovable, an upright vacuum cleaner form assembled from plastic human skeletal bones that pushes air out rather than sucking it in (creating a creaking death-rattle sound every few minutes, like clockwork) - refers to the American obsession with cleanliness, but also to the lives of workers who make the parts for these machines.

Hard Alee, a sculpture of thick sisal ropes hanging in a window, would be the anomaly in this show - its powerful, solid presence and surface roughness stand in stark contrast to Belknap's humorous, plastic-toy-colored, multipiece constructions - but it provokes the same simultaneous feelings of familiarity and anxiety.

There/not there

Will Steacy's color photographs of a bullet hole in a window in Atlantic City, a swastika carved into a tree trunk in Los Angeles, a circle of cigarette butts on a Philadelphia street, and a bench in Queens with its seat removed offer forensic evidence that people live or congregate in these in-between places, but they are never shown.