Cannupa Hanska Luger's "American Traditional" at Garth Greenan, SoHo, NYC, Through Oct. 24

Garth Greenan Gallery is showing Cannupa Hanska Luger's American Traditional at 10 Greene Street in SoHo. The show closes Saturday, October 24. Luger is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota.

The gallery describes a group of new sculptures built from salvaged materials and hand-built ceramics. The clay is ironstone, finished with sumi ink and direct flame, so every piece is the same matte black, with a tone the gallery calls mournful, even elegiac. Found objects are arranged with precision: Buffalo nickels, Pulaski axes, railroad spikes and concertina wire. They sit alongside ceramic replicas of a skinned pronghorn deer, a stack of bison skulls and a severed Sharps Model 1874 sporting rifle. According to the gallery, the works recall specific episodes in the history of Western expansion, taking apart and eulogizing the dream of dominion while turning its material remnants into elegant, unsettling forms.

Hyperallergic's Hrag Vartanian reviewed the show and called it Luger's strongest work yet. He describes an abstracted bison of ironstone clay and sumi ink resting on a burned, blackened 19th-century American dining table, and a stack of bison skulls on a surface with vintage axes for legs. Vartanian notes that Luger sets aside the participatory, ceramics-heavy projects he is best known for, arriving at a more declarative synthesis of wood, ink and archive. He writes that the beauty of the forms almost lets you forget the destruction, yet that history is embedded in each element.

Hyperallergic's separate Indigenous Peoples' Day guide says the exhibition inaugurates the gallery's new space and quotes the artist on the "bizarre and horrific history of colonialism." It also notes the shift away from Luger's usual color.

The gallery's other current show, Rosalyn Drexler's My Life Has a Life of Its Own, runs through the same date at 25 Greene Street. Both spaces are open Tuesday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.