When the rubber hits the wall

Yet her best works manage to infuse these concerns, so deeply rooted in art history, with terrific zest, unearthing dynamic new possibilities of expression.

The material itself — recycled tires and their inner tubes, spliced, stretched, twisted, knotted, and otherwise reshaped — is at the heart of Booker’s success. In its proliferating textures, these tires express a metamorphic freedom one would never have suspected from such abject, obdurate material. (Try picking up a car tire. Now try cutting through its structural bands of steel and tearing it into pieces. Booker does this daily; I’m assured she has good tools.)

But if the surface textures of Booker’s sculptures are endlessly surprising, suggesting everything from animal armor to palm fronds and feathers, the forms have a tendency toward symmetry that can feel rigid and unyielding. Sometimes there’s expressive power in this very rigidity — something austere, implacable, and foreboding. But at other times the interest palls.

Too many of Booker’s works, I found, are structured around boxy, predictable shapes, reducing the astonishing textures and shifting black, glossy, and matte tones of the tires to empty ornament. I much preferred the works that played fast and loose with form — the ones that seemed to spill out of themselves, playing havoc with the distinction between structure and surface, embracing asymmetry and, with it, a kind of pressurized psychological release.

All this comes through most strongly in Booker’s smaller works. Her wall piece “Twist of Fate,’’ for instance, is little more than a sculptural sketch — an insouciantly tied bow that resembles a piece of three-dimensional Zen calligraphy. But its loops and arabesques set up their own internal rhymes and pressures. It works.