Ghostly staircases, donkey bridles, fragmented toy parts, and farming tools coalesce in Sula Bermudez-Silverman’s breakout solo show, an ode to the mold-making process. The works are deftly crafted studies in polarities: tenderness and brutality, subject and object, original and copy. She revels in the joints, seams, and other mechanisms of mass production, revealing the inner workings of exploitative American industries, such as tobacco farming, which relied on brutal slave labor.

Rigorously conceived sculptures made from delicate materials—molten glass, pillows swathed in iridescent silk—are bound and yoked by tools that were once used to rake, trim, and mow crops, or control farm animals. An image of a mule—a hybrid species bred to work—appears as a motif on a honey-colored glass sheet that mimics the stamp for Brown’s Mule chewing tobacco (amulatamiento, all works 2025). The piece’s title refers to a disease that can afflict tobacco plants.

While the artist’s sculptures are rarely figurative, they almost always reflect corporeal forms. Take blister i, an amethyst-colored orb that is nearly cleaved in half, almost like a cell splitting in mitosis. The rusty, menacing part bisecting the voluptuous glass simultaneously threatens and cradles the fragile material. In blister iv, the glass is harnessed and reigned into place by an iron bridle. It seems to ooze out of the metal armature, resembling the fecund form of the 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf.

The star of the show is vestige, a trompe l’oeil pewter cabin that looks like buffed metal but is in fact made of MDF, paint, and wood. Created to mimic a domestic object —a midcentury ice cream mold—it is hinged and stamped with the numeral 508, perhaps a reference to the software error code for an infinite loop. The oversize dollhouse takes on a dark and poignant layer of meaning because the artist’s childhood home in Altadena, California, burned down during the recent wildfires.