The materially innovative sculptural light fixtures of the 28-year-old Los Angeles and New York City-based James Cherry defy easy categorization. Is his work art? Craft? Design? Sculpture? Yes. It is this blend that drew the New York-based gallerist AlexTieghi-Walker to give Cherry a solo show this winter at his Tiwa Select Gallery, which show-cases the work of highly experimental, material-driven craft artists.

Cherry sees potential in objects and debris that others look past, and his work gives them newlife in ways that belie their material origins. For instance, this current body of work began at aWalmart when Cherry saw a worker discarding a huge box of old tights. He took them back tohis studio and started to play with them, stretching them into shapes undergirded by armaturesCherry fashioned from materials such as sticks, bones, piano strings, mothballs, and balloons tocreate interesting forms. Loving the formal elasticity of the material but needing to find a way tomake both the stockings strong and to strengthen their often flimsy internal structures, Cherrydevised a fiberglass fabric-coating technique to make the pieces sturdy and permanent.Anoth-er series utilizes an ingenious clay-like substance fashioned from an ever-changing blend ofthings like dust from his studio floor and ground-up natural fibers like corn husks mixed withglue and flour to create a novel form of clay that air dries. Once sanded down and coated,its delicately mottled surface has a lovely texture and hue, resembling perhaps a marriage ofplaster, cement, clay, and metal. The results have yielded a collection of lighting that is allur-ing, playful, and confounding—as the materials are transformed into something wholly new.