b'Karl BurkheimerMaking TimeDiana NawiKarl Burkheimer is a sculptor whose medium is often the most mundane and humble of construction materials. In many ways, these simple physical things serve as an index of much larger ideas of time, matter, and labor. They often make manifest a perpetual state of becom-ing and undoing.Burkheimer traces his interest in sculpture to his younger days spent in construction, a job that set in place not only a material vocabulary but also an understanding of craft bound to the real world. Burkheimer works in a variety of ways and scales, ranging from hand-held carved wooden geometric blocks and wheat-pasted photographic images to architec-tural interventions. At the center of his practice are large sculptures that take the form of newly built walls and platforms, albeit ones with strange torques, curves, holes, and angles. They are sculptures that feel as though they have grown out of oras in the work Gordon Matta-Clark, an important reference point for Burkheimerbeen extracted from our built environment.For a recent project at the Los Angeles Valley College (LAVC) Art Gallery, tautline (2018), Burkheimer created a freestanding sculpture from metal and wallboard, as well as made use of the gallerys three angled floating walls as the basis for his project, building protruding, curved walls off of them. The works appeared as a kind of revised architectural infrastructure. As with much of his work, Burkheimer plastered and painted the majority of the drywall sur-face, but also left areas unfinished, exposing the different colors and textures that arise from the building process.This lack of finalization speaks to a fundamental aspect of the artists practice, one that allows objects to continually evolve, but that also importantly creates space for others to partici-pate. For the project at LAVC, Burkheimer worked with students to paint the surfaces of his sculptures, giving them free reign in the gallery. Over the course of a few sessions the walls and sculptures became a cacophony of marks, images, graffiti, pours, doodles, and text. The end result was a palimpsest of different artists gestures and new layers of time. Burkheimers 22'