The Facade Commission: Carol Bove, The séances aren’t helping

Created by the artist Carol Bove (born 1971), The séances aren’t helping is the second commission to be featured on the facade of The Met Fifth Avenue. Working improvisationally, Bove sculpts at scale and in the round, without any preparatory drawings. For this commission, she used a one-to-one mock-up of the Museum’s empty niches to construct four abstract sculptures made of sandblasted, contorted stainless-steel tubes and five-foot-wide reflective aluminum disks. Despite the weight and heft of these sculptures, they appear astoundingly lithe and supple, almost mercurial—an effect Bove achieves by pushing her materials to their physical limits. Projecting outward from the niches, the works confound perception.