How does a sculptor keep his work from toppling over? Installing new work in Brooklyn, New York, and Mexico City, artist Alejandro Almanza Pereda discusses the process and ideas behind his finely balanced sculptural works. At Storefront Ten Eyck Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Almanza drills holes into an unexpected array of found objects, including a bowling ball, a plaster bust, and a lava rock. Almanza and his artist friends carefully suspend and connect these objects with dowels and fluorescent tubes, creating a delicate sculptural network. Almanza explains that this improvised “common sense” engineering is inspired by the kinds of ad hoc, temporary fixes that construction crews make on the streets of Mexico and the United States.

At Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City, Mexico, Almanz builds At the palace in the air at 4 am (2013) out of pre-fabricated industrial shelving. Instead of the typical rows of uniform shelves, Almanza creates a jungle gym-like construction of vertical and horizontal planes that hold decidedly non-industrial, domestic objects like trophies and suitcases. Culled from flea markets and sidewalk sales, these objects evoke Almanza’s childhood, a time “when you learn how to deal with objects and materials around you” and begin to understand their fragility and value.