Pictured: The intricate sculptures of Tom Casmer blend the organic and the mechanical. Photo by Phil Lederer.

Walk through the doors of Art Center Sarasota any time between now and January 13 and find an exhibition worth exploring at every turn. To the left, find Aimee Jones’ Of Mementos and Fetishes, an irreverent and biting commentary in oils and sculpture on a culture’s love/hate relationship with the female form in a land of lust and consumption, where all the vases are vulvic and the bare-breasted Venus of Florida swims in shark-infested waters. To the right, enter the whimsical world of Ethan Fielder’s imagination with Beyond the Sidewalk, a sculptural exhibition highlighting the underappreciated aesthetic of the fire hydrant, with everything from an industrial recreation that looks like it speaks with a New York City accent to a multicolored melting hydrant that looks like something from the trippier periods of Nickelodeon animation.

And dead ahead, ensconced in the central gallery like hidden treasures lining the burial chamber of some long-dead king, hangs gestalt, a collection of impossibly intricate handmade wooden constructions from Sarasota sculptor Tom Casmer.

A year in the making, the exhibition includes the unveiling of nine new large-scale original works, in addition to nine selected from the past few years. The show also features the debut of the largest piece Casmer has ever made, a massive hexaptych construction six feet wide and nearly five-and-a-half feet tall, named MOFO, or Mechanism of Feasible Origins. Too big for Casmer’s one-car garage workspace, it was created as six separate panels, each carefully measured and crafted to interlock with its neighbors. “And that use of interior negative space was really interesting to me,” Casmer says. “I wanted to explore that, with the aligning and the shadows.” Due to its size, seeing it hang at Art Center Sarasota was the artist’s first opportunity to see the work as originally envisioned. “It had the impact I was hoping it would have,” he says. “That MOFO experience.”

Much of Casmer’s work is similarly intuitive in its creation, flowing from Casmer’s imagination and then blooming to whatever shape it needs to occupy. Only one, Provenance, is contained by any preordained border. Some stretch from floor to ceiling like totem poles from an ancient civilization, others are compact, bursting with potential energy like artifacts of alien technology. Two are free-standing; another bends at a right angle to travel along the wall as it turns a corner. All have Casmer’s trademark techno-organic texture, each a dizzying landscape of tightly organized knobs and levers and dials and doodads that flow like circuit board topography, all of it handcrafted. And one, painted bright red, is unmistakably a dude, right down to the naughty bits.

“Yeah, that’s a little guy,” Casmer says, pointing out that it has ribs and a heart too. (Though neglecting to address the fact that the whole thing retains a certain phallic shape that could arguably override his objections.) But giggling at genitalia misses the point—in a sea of sculptures that defy easy description or categorization, the presence of something so blatantly representational plants an undeniable seed, tempting the viewer to believe the other sculptures as likewise things to be deciphered.

That maybe, if one looks at the thing with just the right kind of eyes, an answer will be revealed.

Currently on display at Art Center Sarasota, gestalt runs through January 13, alongside Of Mementos and Fetishes and Beyond the Sidewalk.

Pictured: The intricate sculptures of Tom Casmer blend the organic and the mechanical. Photo by Phil Lederer.