The first ‘shot’ you get as you walk down the aisle is the Hyundai Accent. All white plastic with wheels and panels akimbo. The piece was assembled indoors after being cast from its original –a 2006 model– in the short driveway outside. Part, one imagines, performance for the neighbors part concession to the reality of getting an automobile inside a synagogue. Said synagogue, in Ridgewood, being where Jude Tallichet maintains her studio. The pink-painted exterior doors of the building advertise something about the place, perhaps that it is no longer a site of divine worship: it has taken a secular turn.

Within it is a de-factory, a very un-Warholian place. Tallichet’s craft chops at casting are in remarkable evidence all around, the Hyundai being the obvious current example. (She is assisted in this by master mold maker Sabrina Lessard). But Tallichet’s studio also reverses the industrialization process that put the Hyundai on the street to begin with. In her studio Tallichet dismantles, disassembles and undoes the already built. That Hyundai again — having cast the original, Tallichet carefully formed in clay a 14-inch model of it. A procedure, no doubt, carried out in some South Korean factory back in the 1990’s but that time around it would have been as the prototyping, first step toward developing, manufacturing and distributing the cast version sitting in Tallichet’s studio. Here, process reversed, this same clay ‘prototype’ of Tallichet’s is cast in various materials and ends up as a traffic jam snaking across another section of her studio floor evoking as it does the notorious traffic jam in Godard’s Weekend.

Disassembling or working the object backwards, is then, a motif of Tallichet’s. Thus the synagogue is not only a place of work for her; it comes to also be something of an archeological dig. When Tallichet first moved in she found still there the pews, the piano, dinner servings for 200 congregants etc., etc. Much of this has been disassembled, cast and re-deployed in tableaux stationed around the building. The two-hundred place settings, cast in colorful plastic, reformed and repeated, reach for the women’s gallery and beyond toward the roof. The piano keyboard, sundered from its housing, is, again, repeated and reformed, dressed with various hues and accumulated in mounds alongside a pile of casts of a taxidermied bob cat.

There is a falcon not hearing the falconer quality to all this. Or at least a thought that if things are not in fact going to fall apart, Tallichet is going to break them apart anyway. Destroying, straightforward brokenness or bemused displacement of the original, or indeed its cast, is all-central to Tallichet’s project. The un-held center hides in the untidily flung clothes, cast in bronze, (litter that will last forever) that lie strewn across the studio floor. (Also recently strewn across the floor at Valentine gallery http://valentinegallery.blogspot.com/) The same force is the centrifugal power in the, also bronze, cast of a collapsed and broken set of shelves parked outside in an alley way beside the building. A literally heavy monument to falling knowledge and intellectual ennui caught or caused, it is not clear which, by Tallichet in mid-crash. Not mere anarchy, but it is hard to think of the cast as the seamless index of its original when the brokenness of both clamors for ones attention. The Hyundai again– gorgeous, perfect, like the bear skin rug, but immobilized, as if knee-capped in its youth.

For more images of her work visit http://judetallichetstudio.com/