Rachel Perry Welty

AT CLIFFORD-SMITH GALLERY

When was the last time you thought about a twist tie? Perhaps never, but this morning, when you went to grab a piece of toast, you might have untwisted one absent-mindedly. For Rachel Perry Welty, however, twist ties become art, as do medical charts and Braille.

An overwhelming construction of colored twist ties, shaped into interconnected loops, encompasses a gallery wall. The thousands of intricate twist ties, though at first glance an entirely bizarre creation, do not fail at least to inspire tremendous appreciation for Welty's fastidiousness. Taken a little differently, however, the construction resembles nothing so much as a giant piece of Swiss cheese.

Welty also deconstructs the Christmas wreath and transforms blue twist ties into the plastic pine needles we normally picture on a wreath. The most impressive twist-tie construction is her "Ironic Column," which is a far cry from Widener's marble columns. In fact, this column most likely couldn't support any structure, for it has to be hung from the ceiling and is actually just long chains of white twist ties strung together en masse to give the illusion of a solid surface.

Welty's other pieces featured in the show seem vastly disconnected from her work with twist-ties. Medical charts covered in Wite-Out, Manila-Out, glue and odd colored dots line one wall, faintly resembling Mondrian paintings as viewed by a tremendously nearsighted museum-goer. The charts, while each is a different size, vary very little from one to the next. Though the idea is innovative, Welty simply seems to be showing us yet another way to appreciate the diversity of supplies from Staples.

Welty's Braille compositions are more interesting, with dots punched into thick sheets of paper and then painstakingly numbered with lead pencil. These connect-the-dots creations have dots numbering into the thousands, but, alas, resemble nothing more than a younger sibling's activity book gone 3-D.

Welty's penchant for intricately presented collections of absolutely random objects is blatantly clear with the crowning jewel of the show. Her "Altered Receipts" is a collection of ingenious doodles on receipts from places like Finagle A Bagel and Banana Republic. Taken individually, each receipt could be construed as the product of intense boredom, yet the line of barely recognizable receipts, each individually framed and centered on white paper, underscores how art can be found anywhere and created from anything, even a receipt from Marshalls.