Photo By Carl Solway Gallery

Albert Paley's "Interlace" is a made from interlocked steel and stainless steel and resembles a drawing.

If sculpture could sing, Albert Paley's joyous pieces would be soloists. It's just possible they could dance, too. Materials usually perceived as stolid, sharp-edged and commanding are, in his hands, unusually pliable and responsive.

Best known for out-of-doors, site-specific pieces, Paley in fact works in a broad range of size, purpose, material and medium. The exhibition now on view at Carl Solway Gallery includes functional objects, drawings and monotypes as well as individual sculptures and is a comprehensive look at his work since 1989.

Public projects are represented by maquettes and photographs as well as material proposing a work that might be realized at the new riverfront residential development, One River Plaza at Yeatman's Cove.

"Metal is a diverse medium," Paley says in an interview at the Solway space. "You can work in small or large scale, and it has more versatility than ceramics or glass. You can do anything you want."

What Paley seems to want is effortless-appearing -- although in fact labor-intensive -- works that invite an emotional response from the viewer. Fifteen people are employed in his Rochester, N.Y. studio, which is outfitted to handle the welding and cutting -- the industrial side of metalworking.

It's possible to follow the artist's line of thinking in some sections of the show, as with the drawing for "Desert Willow" and its resulting small-scale sculpture.

"The drawing shows a reference to music," Paley says. "You start with a rhythm or gesture or counterpoint, develop the composition, at first with no specific forms, then start picking out contour. What's there? Giacometti worked this way, the only artist I know who does."

Elsewhere in the exhibition, the monotype "San Jose Series #4" is hung above a low table, its glass top protecting the sculpture contained within. Paley points out "the same sensibility in composition" of the two works.

The functional objects are gathered in one gallery and play off each other in a lively fashion. Paley's voluptuous, ribbon-like treatment of steel, stainless steel, copper -- sometimes combined with granite or glass -- produces extravagant household accoutrements. There are inventive floor and table lamps and a set of fireplace tools that looks like a maquette for one of his own sculptures but appears to be eminently useful.

"Useful" isn't his first aim, however.

"As an artist, functionalism in furniture is not a concern," Paley says. "Our culture is so consumer-based that I'm interested in a sense of how we engage with objects. We used to hear about 'family heirlooms,' but it's not a term much used now. These (dinner table, sideboard, etc.) are almost ceremonial objects and bear witness to what's happening -- theatrical, in a sense, but not superficial. There's a performance going on in reference to these objects."

Indeed. Would dining at "Shock Breakfast Table," with a marvelous formed and fabricated mild steel sculpture under a round glass top, produce conversation as witty as the table itself? Perhaps. Or would the diner not be equal to the occasion? I'd be glad to give it a try.

The furniture, including floor and table lamps, is one-of-a-kind except for candleholders produced in series.

"Interlace," a smallish work about 20 by 30 inches and less than 6 inches deep, is also a series edition. Formed and fabricated steel joined with stainless steel in an interlocking composition, it hides and reveals at the same time.

"It's like a drawing," Paley says.

Large sculptures, like the furniture, are shown together and inform each other. The fine twists and turns of "Transpose," which stands 87 inches tall, take on a different life in "Plume." Slightly shorter but fully as imposing, "Plume" incorporates a glass element I'm tempted to call a "gorgeous blob" or "splendid hunk" or some other term not admitted to by higher art criticism.

"I hire the glass foundry and design and work with them," Paley says. "They do the technical stuff for me ... then, in my own studio, I design the piece around it. It's like a found object, something taken out of context. I create something sympathetic to it."

In another, smaller version of his slender shafts, "Odyssey," Paley composes a pair of formed, fabricated and polychromed carbon steel pieces, 30 inches high, each with two upright rods lightly touched by twining coils and bearing like a banner a wavy, ribbon-like scroll of yellow steel. The effect is celebratory.

I've seen Paley's site-specific, out-of-doors works in Atlanta and in Asheville, N.C., both from the early 1990s. Each is represented here by a photograph, and Ashville's "Passage" by its maquette. The smaller scale pieces that make up this exhibition hold their own against my memory of those works.

This Solway show, with works primarily chosen from the late 1990s through 2005, suggests Paley continually develops his mastery of the medium. It seems as though there's nothing to which he can't coerce metal to adapt. Grade: A

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ALBERT PALEY: SCULPTURE, DRAWINGS & FUNCTIONAL OBJECTS is on display at Carl Solway Gallery in Over-the-Rhine through April 7.