Wynne Greenwood's new sculptures are gray heads set on brightly colored pedestals made of fabric she hand-dyed and sewed around plinths of foam.

Pedestals are usually hard, not soft. They are usually dull, not bright.

Busts, meanwhile, are usually made of fine materials. These look like concrete. And busts usually seem to thrust upward, independent of their pedestals. These slouch down into their pedestals, showing their weight like bodies on memory foam. The crease where they make contact is touching; it sticks in the mind. (In ceramics, there is also an entire philosophy associated with how the base is shaped, whether it is flat or curved—a certain curvature creates a shadow that lends the object more appearance of weight.)

The heads on the pedestals have more than one face, suggesting conflict. They have a deeper conflict, too: They're not made of concrete but of more delicate porcelain. Their surfaces still bear the impressions of the artist's hands—scratch marks, fingerprints, signs of shaping—but the paint color gives their soft skin a stony topcoat.

There is one more head, on the floor. It's weird to see a head on the floor. It is gray like the rest, but made of stuffed fabric, plopped down on hard ground.

The ricocheting back and forth between hard and soft, and the contrast between what something is made of and what it looks like, raises references to gender and sculpture. Some feminist sculptors in the '60s and '70s deliberately used fabrics and soft materials, including homey afghans and stretchy stuffed pantyhose, as a counterpoint to the hard surfaces of typical minimalists—setting up domestic/intimate studio environments as opposed to the hard-hatted construction sites increasingly necessary to create large-scale sculptures by artists as seemingly different as Mark Di Suvero, Richard Serra, and Gordon Matta-Clark.

Greenwood remixes the references, bringing hardness to soft places and vice versa, adding and draining color in the inverse of what's expected. Her gray is like Jasper Johns's: a form of masking, ungiving, secret-keeping, protection. These sculptures clearly exist in a world where it's sometimes necessary to be hard, where you might find a head just lying there on a floor, where fingers are scratching at faces and eyes are raw from crying, with edges of day-glo green.

Music plays in the gallery, too (Lawrimore Project). It's part of the show; it's Greenwood's new album, A Fire to Keep You Warm* (a copy of the CD is stowed in a slot in another head, a limited-edition sculpture painted purple; scroll to the bottom here for song samples).

One song is an oblique reinterpretation of John Lennon's Give Peace a Chance. Peace In, as opposed to "peace out," is the title of the exhibition. "Peace will give you a chance," the song says. Another song, Dresser, goes: "Move away from the wall/ You've got to lead us on... To where there is no where." The lyrics are full of references to coming together for cultural change out of a shared history, "even if you don't have a memory/ of all the choices/ and of all the voices." As always in Greenwood's singular work, in this hard-soft sculpture and pop-electronic music with folk heart and clarion voice, there is a through-line of feminist and queer conviction running deep. It is quietly leader-like, reassuring.

^{*You can buy a copy of the CD at the gallery for $10.}