Rebecca Ripple in Modern Magazine 3.16.17
The Art of In-Between
The interstice is an idea that has long been invoked in contemporary art. It denotes a transitional space in which definitions are suspended and categories blurred; it’s a productive area of overlap. Interstitial explores object-based sculpture a the brink of these intersecting categories – the precious and the common, “fine art” and craft, permanence and disposal, high and low—revealing the compelling and strange spaces of intersection between these categorical absolutes. Interstitial offers a welcome descent into an un-scripted territory; the familiar becomes new again from the vantage point of somewhere in-between.
“Since the advent of modernism, most contemporary sculpture has been explored in purely formal terms,” says curator O’Brien. “Interstitial proposes three-dimensional works at the crossroads between everyday objects and formally configured forms in space. A viewer can marvel at how the commonplace becomes something altogether different in these artists’ deft and sly tinkering with the knowns.”
Jeff Colson, for instance, presents what appears to be an industrial filing cabinet and desk stacked precariously with reams of blank yellowing paper. Upon closer inspection, however, we realize the sculpture is entirely deceptive. The piece, created using the artist’s elaborate trompe l’oeil technique, is made of urethane resin, wood, and acrylic paint, and is, in fact, an elaborate composition staged to look like an unassuming, albeit pathological, accumulation of office supplies.
Kristen Morgin’s sculptural assemblages of raw, unfired painted clay are made to look like unremarkable everyday objects such as paperback books, garden variety tchotchkes, dumpster castaways, and cardboard. In American Portable Pottery Museum (1994), Joel Otterson masses a collection of discarded ceramics to reference domestic handicraft, industrial welding, and the decorative arts. Aili Schmeltz also plays with our object expectations, transforming construction materials such as cinder blocks and bricks with high art casting materials such as bronze, and creating sophisticated abstract geometric installations out of craft materials like thread and macramé.