Cecily Parks on Mariko Makino’s neon-threaded fencing sculptures in Red Hook, where sunlight is not a competitor but a collaborator.
Outdoor sculpture is meant to carve space and play ferociously with size and scale. It considers natural landscape a backdrop, but as seasons shift around the sculptures, the art rarely reciprocates change. Mariko Makino’s exhibition Outside, on view at Entrance, responds to the elements: it enters a dialogue with time.
By day, Makino’s sculptures perpetuate the industrial hues of Entrance — much a product of its surrounding Red Hook, Brooklyn. On a field of bluestone aggregate, three silver hay bales squint in the sun. Behind them, a colony of wiry towers wear stiff metal skirts, like dancers captured mid-twirl. Each outdoor sculpture was constructed from galvanised steel fencing, with a small tube of neon threaded through its centre. As dusk chases day into night, the neon’s shape changes as thin dribbles of noble gas swell into a soft glow, painting the fencing with light.
Neon has been a throughline of Makino’s work since her debut show at Entrance’s Lower East Side space in 2018. Usually paired with reclaimed wood and string, her past sculptures accentuate the stark silhouette of hand-bent glass charged with electricity. Inside Entrance’s indoor gallery at their Red Hook location — a few stacked shipping containers — there are several sculptures with her signature style on display. Outdoors, the neon’s emphasis is not so much form, but rather how it fills space — gradually, in time with the fading sun.
Planning for this exhibition began two years ago, at Makino’s studio in Freehold, New York. In a rural hamlet of the Catskills, the built environment is sparse — power lines streak an empty sky, agricultural equipment sits on endless acres of land. Often, energy infrastructure is abstracted from its human application. Makino was intrigued by these lonely machines and our dependence on their utility. “Have you ever seen a substation where all the power lines converge and then they’re sent out into the world?” Makino asked me when I visited her show in June. “I was just staring at one of those, and I thought, what are these beautiful objects? What are they doing?”
After her friend Louis Shannon, the founder of Entrance, asked her to create a show for the outdoors, Makino uncovered a hundred-foot roll of fencing she had purchased from Tractor Supply years ago. Using galvanised steel fencing adhered to a vision of purposeful structure, while maintaining Makino’s handmade integrity. “I liked the industrial material, but I didn’t want to make a sculpture that looked like it didn’t belong on the land,” Makino said. Her process is intimate. No part of her work was touched by tools other than her hands, pliers, fence cutters, and a trusty wooden jig.
For the centrepiece of the outside work, 5 x 5 Meadow, Makino daisy-chained a cluster of twenty-four sculptures that are just under four feet tall. “I wanted the work to feel low to the ground, close to Earth,” Makino said, comparing fencing’s soft mingling with the land to the brash outlines and height common in outdoor installation. “I really wanted to make a large sculpture that felt feminine.” The sculptures in 5 x 5 Meadow are lit as one, exuding patchworked shades of blush and bronze.
Makino’s neon colour palette draws from time spent lying in the grass by her studio, watching fields meet the horizon. The interdependence of power infrastructure informed her exhibition, but so did living ecosystems. “There’s some sort of tenderness in the connection of all things in nature,” she said. Makino uses neon to visualise the poetry of communal energy — the fabric of both an electrical grid and a mycorrhizal network.
The community ethos of Entrance is intrinsic to how Outside warms the space and invites people to linger. In fact, Entrance extended its hours to encourage viewing the sculptures as they tell time. “The idea is you can come and grill here and enjoy Outside at night with people and continue to give the show life,” Makino said, nodding to a corner of the space where several picnic tables and a camping grill are stowed.
During the launch for Outside, Makino’s friend Danny Bowien served steak au poivre and GLASSER performed a song or two on top of the gallery, while guests weaved between the life-sized lanterns and their puddles of light on nearby ground. Later in the summer, the Neon Moons had a honky-tonk jam, and candles wrapped in Makino’s fencing discards lit the picnic tables for shared meals. Makino was a chef before she was a glass-bender, but has not traded out the art of cooking for her friends — this summer she’s prepared dinner every two weeks for those who wander into the space.
“Every single time we do a show, we dig in deeper with what we’re capable of accomplishing on this land,” Louis Shannon, owner of Entrance, said. Since 2024, Entrance has incrementally expanded its square footage with each artist it shows. Makino’s exhibition is only the fourth on Entrance’s ad hoc timeline, and the first to use the entire lot between Wolcott and Dikeman Streets. The expanded production of Makino’s work was made possible by an artist grant from the Clementine Fund.
“This is a perfect show to me. Seeing Makino’s work here, it reflects where it was made, but she gets to do that in New York City, and a lot more people get to see it than in Freehold,” Shannon said. “That’s the thing with outdoor sculpture, it’s meant to be shared.”
Outside is communal — the sculptures invite a collective experience, for viewers and for nature’s routine. Sunlight is not Makino’s competitor, but her collaborator. When the burning star swings on the horizon, falling quickly out of sight, Outside exchanges darkness for light. Light for energy. Energy for time, always moving around and around.
