A different type of topography inhabits the floor of the gallery. Deep blue water runs from underneath the wall, twists and turns creating rivulets and pools, seeping into the adjacent gallery. To create this work, Shechet has developed a method for literally casting water. Cast in rubber, the piece is a nearly inconceivable map of motion, beautifully managing to capture transition. Pieced together into a blanket of individual casts, each element is like a fingerprint of a moment, impossible to reproduce. Yet, the title Casting Water infers an action and acknowledges our inability to contain the things that surround us. With a spontaneity not unlike Richard Serra’s flung metal casts of corners, the form is dictated by the process. There is a beauty to that which is fleeting, and Shechet’s impulse steers clear of a need to possess. Rather, her work encourages us to pay attention and then let go.

In the eating room of the house on Great Spruce Head Island, Aline Porter, the wife of Elliot Porter, both avid naturalists, kept a list of detailed descriptions of all the wildflowers she found in the surrounding environment. Placed on the wall of this sun-drenched room, the list has naturally faded over time. Paying homage to Porter’s meticulous, yet idiosyncratic act of cataloguing in an effort to truly know something, Shechet has transferred the test in its original handwritten form into a weaving. Everyday Prayer Wheel is an unbroken textile displayed on a structure reminiscent of an over-sized dishtowel rack, referencing the domestic site from which it came. Porter’s actions are not so much captured into a static form or preserved for posterity, as they are the foundation for creating movement. With Buddhist text embroidered on, visitors are encouraged to scroll through the list, thereby setting thoughts into motion.

Walking through the gallery becomes one’s own journey to find flowers. Shechet’s small bronze pieces, inspired by the iconography of Buddhism, interrelate figures in the poses of dancers or the postures of yoga practice– knees bent, arms extended, back arched, toes pointed-until their body parts become the buds, pedals, stems, and leaves of flowers.

Installed in the second room is a skyline of one hundred gray/brown porcelain vessels. Evoking New York City, the smooth surfaces undulate in carrying tones of musted color, the pigment painted into the mold so that it fades with each cast, gradually returning to white until painted once more. Skyline is inspired by both the personal–the daily act of walking across the Brooklyn Bridge and the resulting familiarity with the view of Manhattan–and the communal. An extension of her earlier work wherein vessels and Buddha figures contain the architectural floor plan of Buddhist temples, Shechet’s cityscape responds to our current understanding of the notion of architectural decay. Slow erosion of many temples in the East is nonetheless a natural phenomenon attributed to the passage of time. Recent events have profoundly and irrevocably altered our conception of urban modernist architecture as monumentally solid and eternal. Although cast as whole pieces, Shechet cuts the vessels into parts and reconfigures them in a process that utilizes and then undermines the conventions of seriality and repetition, creating wholly individuated pieces. Just as her manipulation and reconfiguration of the temple floor plans result in poignant articulations of their ephemerality, her homage to the skyline of Manhattan is a reminder to us of the fluidity of life. This understanding is imparted repeatedly in Shechet’s work: in the casting of water, the fading of ceramic pigment, the spinning of the weaving, and the metamorphosis of figures into flowers. Shechet’s Skyline juxtaposed with a seated Buddha, multiple hands over the face in a compelling moment of introspection, suggests that we can know something without holding onto its original form, allowing it to simply be what it is in each moment of its inevitable transformation.