Matt Browning's entire show at Lawrimore Project this month is a small army of what look like ceramics.

Actually they're wood objects, each one hand-whittled from a single piece of wood over many, many hours, following the folk-art tradition of whimsies. They sit quietly and almost weightlessly—you'd be amazed how light they are in your hands; ask to touch them—in the back corner of the back room at the gallery.

Each object is only six, maybe seven inches high and shaped like a funnel standing on three legs over a base. (They're sold one by one; the price for one is $300, for those who've asked about starting collections over in Questionland.)

When the whittling was finished, Browning took pine sap he'd collected, used wood from the same logs he'd found for the carvings to fuel a fire, and boiled/reduced the sap to a tar. He poured the brown bubbly stuff into the funnels—and in each case it froze up at a different moment in the process, leaving some of the funnels drippy and some dry on the outside. Over time, the sap will move ever so slightly and in unpredictable ways, if simply left alone.

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Usually this room has benches, a long table, a fireplace, and several works of art on the walls and on shelves and pedestals. All of that has been cleared out this month, and the fireplace covered over. All for these majestic understatements in the corner.

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