Exhibition: Field Recordings

Field Recordings brings together one work by each of seven artists: LaKela Brown, Andrew Chapman, Jacob Kassay, Alex Kwartler, Jennifer Macdonald, Erin O’Keefe, and Kerry Schuss. These artists take pieces of the physical world as primary sources, making imperfect copies that reach beyond the conceptual boundaries of the original. Inscribing embodied phenomena onto objects, images, and surfaces, they evade the reductive nostalgia embedded in the notion of “analog” without losing its potency as a descriptive category.

LaKela Brown embeds plaster casts of dollar coins into a wall-relief, linking a human body and the abstract monetary value expressed by minted coins. Erupting out of the smooth plaster surface, the coins speak to the absurdity of this exchange—a life for a wobbly stack of metal. Andrew Chapman paints in a palette developed to evoke two faded mid-century reproduction techniques: the industrial stencil oil-card, and the Kodak box. His painting behaves as a textural and pictorial archive of reproduction methods—a hall of mimetic mirrors. Jacob Kassay places diaphonized chameleons embalmed for laboratory research into a photographic enlarger, using their bodies as negatives. His photogram preserves and dissolves the image of this prototypical shape-shifter, first drained of its color, then given it back, by the photo-chemical process. Alex Kwartler makes a gestural painting of plaster on canvas, into which he embeds a tuna can and prints of pennies and spinning powerballs. These circular echoes spit out ideas both cosmic and routine: it’s just lunch! A bad penny! Try your luck! Jennifer Macdonald casts a fragment of found chair caning in bronze: an exercise that inevitably results in voids and gaps in the pattern, as the metal tries to flow through the thin reeds. The polished bronze sculpture puts the inherent qualities of the wispy original and its solid copy in a funny relation: a permanent copy of ephemeral trash. Erin O’Keefe’s digital photograph performs a sly illusion using collaged paper and wood: a rectangular block is in fact a flat panel, and the red lid leaning against it in the foreground is a paper parallelogram on the same plane. These simple shapes invoke the contradiction of perspectival space, surface vs. depth, and reveal the mind’s tendency to make “sense” of sensory data. Likewise Kerry Schuss’s foreshortened vessel, cast in bronze from a visibly hand-fashioned pattern, slips between pictorial and dimensional space. Schuss’s sculpture draws from the shapes of tantra paintings he was researching at that time, and to his own practice throwing pottery, but its illusory quality touches the universal legibility of the visual magic trick.

In these seven artworks, field work means close encounters, strange phenomena, living with consequences. Field work is curious about the mechanics but doesn’t stop there. Field work is jagged edges, spills and splashes, thumbprints and dust, an odd smell, background noise, room tone, an eerie resemblance. All entendres double, all loops corrupted, all puns intended. —Mamie Tinkler