Marianne Vitale at The Journal Gallery

Years ago, in college, I remember talking to a dreamy-eyed young man dressed in all black. It was the end of spring, and we were swapping our prospective summer plans. He said he was going to ride the rail and travel across the United States. He threw around words like adventure, expansion, and freedom to clarify the romantic ideals that buttressed his obsession with train hopping. Those words, rising from the past and trailing like phantoms, followed me as I snaked through Blowing Robots, Marianne Vitale’s solo exhibition at The Journal Gallery.

Composed of sculptures and readymade objects sourced from decommissioned trains, Blowing Robots mutates locomotive remnants into bizarre formations of steel and aluminum. Based in New York, Vitale often works with materials and infrastructures associated with American industrialization. In past projects she has made bronze-cast structures modeled from covered bridges that were built during the 19th century, and has incorporated reclaimed wood and steel from factories and railroad tracks.

Across the gallery, individual cubes, each measuring 13 x 13 x 13 inches, are stacked into pillars, while another cluster of cubes are splayed across the floor like the start of a tessellated design. Attended by rust and other marks of dereliction, Vitale’s sculptures read less like an ode to a bygone-era and more as a trove of minimalist objects. Resembling buildings in the midst of dissolution, her sculptures’ forms seem to channel the energy of an industrial ghost town contending with its own ruin.

In the series, titled Cubes (all works 2025), the steel plating that usually protects diesel engines has been cut into square pieces and welded into hollow blocks. Six sculptures command various areas of the gallery, with each configuration adhering to a specific color scheme. In one piece, 38 cubes are arranged into a crude cityscape. No two faces of the cube are alike—burnt orange triangles and rectangles mix with splotches of black and mustard to create expressive abstract compositions. A few surfaces contain fractions of letters and numbers, where the curve of a zero or eight might become a frowning arc. I stood before 12 cubes stacked into a wall-like object, consisting of six columns and two rows. Glints of metal sparkled like the shard of a broken mirror as inkblots of dusty rose spilled over the surface.

Elsewhere, Vitale installed two types of locomotive components, a pneumatic regulator and cylinder heads, as readymade wall sculptures. Torn from their context, Junk and Skull could be relics from a steampunk fantasy in contrast to the minimalism of the cubes. Cheekily anthropomorphic, it’s impossible to ignore the phallic form of Junk, while the aluminum death mask of Skull registers as a somber omen.

Surrounded by these remains of the industry, I contemplated the gap between 2026 and 1869, when the first transcontinental railroad in the U.S. was completed. Though it’s billed as one of the great achievements of our country, when viewing the triumph estranged across Vitale’s sculptures, all I can think about are those echoing words ahead of a summer break, and how easily the promise of adventure can curdle into the failures of ruthless expansion and subjugation.