Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you Vanessa Kauffman’s review of Gabrielle Teschner’s In the Offing at Irving Street Projects in San Francisco. The author notes, “Teschner’s works epitomize a high standard of craft, but by the same turn they destabilize ready-made, rigid perceptions of architectural perfection.” This article was originally published on March 29, 2016.

Gabrielle Teschner. In the Offing, 2016; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Irving Street Projects.

“The offing” is the farthest point the eye can see when looking at the ocean from shore. It is the lateral strip of water that concludes the earthly side of the horizon, and is the recipient of both the first and last kiss of light as the day begins and ends. Elementally the offing has a physical, water-saturated truth, although it is intangible; by definition, the offing is an unreachable place, a place that must keep its distance to keep its name. Metaphorically, the offing is that something far in the future that we anticipate, make assumptions about, and lose sleep over, even as it continues to occupy a very unreal and ill-defined shape. It is this kind of anticipatory thinking that imbues the works of artist Gabrielle Teschner in her current show, In the Offing, a rotating installation of works on fabric and paper made during Teschner’s three-month residency at Irving Street Projects (ISP), a conjoint studio and exhibition space in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco.

Marrying method and material, Teschner has made a ritual of walking the six blocks from ISP to the Pacific Ocean daily to collect seawater throughout her residency. Back in the studio, Teschner mixes the seawater with watercolor pigments to create mottled oceanic hues that she washes onto blocks of unbleached muslin. Blocks painted on different days have distinct dispositions. They—along with the handful of typed haikus that are taped to the front window and a sequence of notational paper cups lining the sill—are a book of days, a calendar of Teschner’s processional.

Read the full article here.