On Relationship: Tom Lane's Sculpture Exhibition

M.E.T. Projects, a contemporary art gallery, will present Tom Lane: On Relationship: What Connects, What Divides, a solo exhibition exploring the ways people connect, separate, confront and coexist. Opening Sunday, Oct. 4, in downtown Red Wing, the exhibition brings together more than three decades of Lane’s sculpture, including porcelain birch trunks, modernist chairs joined into single structures, installations of clenched fists, cobalt-blue porcelain rocks and a new series of peace-sign vases. The exhibition, M.E.T. Projects’ first solo show, runs through Nov. 1. A public opening and opportunity to meet the artist will begin at 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 4. Admission is free. Lane, who taught at the University of Minnesota for 44 years, often begins with familiar objects and transforms them into studies of human relationships. His “Meta Chairs” (1990), fabricated at Thonet’s plant in Statesville, North Carolina, use variations of Marcel Breuer’s classic cantilever chair to suggest different social arrangements. In one work, two chairs rise from a single base and face one another; in another, one chair is elevated above its partner. The theme continues in Lane’s sculptures of clenched fists. Arranged in rows, circles and larger compositions, the individual hands can appear from a distance as a single unified form, but separate into distinct figures as the viewer approaches. “Each fist represents a person,” Lane said. “That person is resisting and considering action.” Lane’s porcelain birch sculptures grew from a fallen tree on his property in Hudson, Wisconsin, in 2023. He cut the trunk into eight sections, made molds of the pieces, cast them in porcelain and reassembled them, preserving the form of a tree that no longer stands. The exhibition also includes a ring of 20 cobalt-blue porcelain rocks and a new series of colorful vases shaped around the familiar peace symbol. Lane’s work is represented in major museum collections. His “9/11 Memorial Urn,” a 56-inch porcelain vessel bearing the names of the 2,977 people killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, is in the collection of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York. His work is also held by the Weisman Art Museum and the Albuquerque Museum, among other institutions.