"can you tell who is coming"

or, Some Time Ago through March 13. Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m.- 8 p.m.; Saturday 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Winchester Cultural Center, 702-455-7340.

D.K. Sole’s exhibition or, Some Time Ago extracts the 2D from 3D forms. No massive, ponderous objects marshal the gallery space; no backbreaking hunks of art to haul about. Sole’s sculpture doesn’t so much fill the Winchester Cultural Center as hover within it. Her delicate, ephemeral pieces—all 96 of them—seem like a colony of gonzo beasties visiting from an interstellar realm, or a flock of affable creatures animated with a disarming, post-apocalyptic verve.

Materials matter. Sole collects random spoor and detritus, leavings and scree discarded in the Las Vegas cityscape. Bits of paper, lollipop sticks, fake flower petals, paperclips, golf balls, headphone ear pieces, bottle caps—her sculptures are a compendium of what we don’t want to see on the ground, what we can’t consider as art because ... Geez, litter? But in Sole’s hands, a chewed pen cap becomes weirdly fascinating, a scratched eyeglass lens a source of sustained contemplation. We look at these little pieces of junk like never before because they’re no longer junk—they’re shapes, colors, texture, and forms integrated into miniature minimalist sculptures.

Sole's "they followed him in an earnest and solemn petition."

Wire is key. Serving as a practical way to connect fragments, it also functions sometimes as line, sometimes as volume. Sole often “draws” in space with her wire, recalling classic, delicate works by Richard Tuttle or Curt Asker. Or she may shape the wire so that phantom 3D forms appear, almost as if the missing planes were transparent. For example, in “not aware that they had met lately,” the wire has an almost calligraphic appeal, the black reel supplying the central gravity of the composition, the yellow fragments of plastic a lyrical note. In “twisted, then carefully folded,” the wire delineates invisible volumes within a biomorphic cloth/net/thread/rubber/adhesive/aluminum assemblage.

Wire, too, is key in the hanging of the show. With its low ceilings, curved wall, nonexistent natural light, industrial carpet, generic spotlights and walls in need of fresh paint, the Winchester Cultural Center Gallery is one of the most challenging exhibition spaces in town. Sole opted to create a wire web across the walls and hang her works as stars in a constellation (or perch her non-carbon-based life-forms in a net). She made excellent use of the spotlights to highlight the wire in the pieces, so that the shadows draw upon the wall the lines the wires draw in space.

In upcycling fragments of consumer residue into coherent works, Sole sits at the confluence between found-object assemblage and ecology art. In the strongest pieces, the components merge into a cohesive whole rather than insisting upon their individual thinginess. (It’s not a broken LED bulb—it’s color, shape and form.) All in all, a quirky but charming exhibition, full of unexpectedly resonant works.