I often think about how Dustin Fosnot's work, like many others, trades in the vulnerable quality of everyday materials, their weakness making them open and available to a viewer. Libby Black, Chris Johanson, Stephanie Syjuco, and Tom Sachs, to one extent or another, work in such idioms of humble materials and/or haphazard construction. Fosnot's miniature snowscapes used burbling styrofoam beads to great effect: they made his work funny and charming, their complete transformation mesmerizing.

For many years, solidity was a defining characteristic of sculpture, whether modernist, minimal, or classical. Unfortunately, permanence helped sculpture seal itself off from the world, making it unapproachable and stodgy. By comparison, sculpture cobbled together out of cardboard, duct tape, plastic and styrofoam seems fresh, vibrant, and unpretentious, allowing an artist to sneak up on a viewer and deliver insight, commentary, or reflection.

Such was the case with all of Fosnot's work that I had seen, from his MFA show at SFAI with its miniature cars wobbling above a duct tape highway to his impressive dioramas at the Lightbox gallery in L.A..

What then to make of Dustin Fosnot's use of less vulnerable materials in his current show, Cyanide at Steven Wolf Fine Arts? His brightly colored cast rubber staircases extract elements of architecture and beautifully highlight one organ of a living building. But their smooth surface and sturdy construction are charmless, their miniaturization too cute. The only clunky element comes from their haphazard attachment to the wall, which seems ill-conceived.

Untitled, mixed media collage on adhesive photo paper, 2008.

Fosnot's dust collages, magical scatterings of dust and styrofoam beads, while brilliant invocations of cosmology, immateriality, and the infinitely small (Kabokov's, "The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away" comes to mind) are, with their shiny black surfaces, sturdy aluminum backings, so very un-fragile. They are so physically permanent and sturdy and slick that they are, more than anything, art objects that announce themselves as art objects. They have an objecthood which suggests no history, no past, no relationship to the world at large. At least not as well as Fosnot's earlier work. These collages look less like documents or objective realities (as an unbiased record of dust, and as one object calling attention to its self in a reality comprised of objects) than like pristine art-objects. These collages are so perfect they are neither real nor resonant. Instead they are frustrating because they are so close to brilliant. They look like objects constructed to be as perfect and beautiful as they are, with dust meticulously sifted across the surface. Meticulous slickness is a perfectly fine quality for some artists. It's boring and disappointing for Fosnot's work.

Untitled, c-print, 2008.

The title piece, three mattresses lying on the floor of the gallery, each with his silhouette created by a cyanide-sun print are the most disappointing of the show. Documentation that shows how the artist found the mattresses, brought them to the studio, sprayed them with a photo-sensitive solution, lay on them to create a silhouette, and hosed them down at a car wash, only underscores how contrived the process was. The objects themselves are blah. Applying a photographic process to such objects achieves no real resonance. And their displacement has no meaningful relationship to site. Like the show generally, the piece is off the mark.

Duston Fosnot: Cyanide will be on view at Steven Wolf Fine Art through November 15th.