Kristin Cammermeyer. Elephant Art Space, 2016; site-specific mixed-media installation at Elephant Art Space, Glassell Park, CA. Courtesy of the Artist.

Many of Cammermeyer’s pieces involve found materials, placed in conversation within their installation sites, which she then documents or records to create accompanying videos. These video pieces extend her invented spaces and allow her to explore the conceptual effects of building and dismantling within a short time frame, collapsing and expanding the assemblage visually and aurally to consider the boundaries of structure and enclosure. At what point does something change from a building to a landscape to an ecology?

In the work 40 Days in 8332 Scenes (Generating a Psychic Ecology with Available Means) (2016), Cammermeyer uses stop-motion animation, shifting one’s sense of perspective with each added layer. The work’s kaleidoscopic symmetries convey affective associations—the gothic, science fiction, the natural world—that pull a viewer through an experience of psychic travel. The video begins with a view of the wall of the gallery, Elephant Art Space, in which Cammermeyer built the initial installation, and defines the viewer’s physical context. Then, emerging from the center of the screen, are a string of images: dark, delicate, almost Edwardian filigrees. From this first column, objects gyrate, whirr, and flash like strobes across the screen; the shifting light evokes passing days and nights, bird songs and animal calls evoke the outdoors. The image seems to breathe and grow, taking a viewer far beyond the immediate surroundings. From the edges of the video frame, feathery green ferns bloom and mix with industrial grating. Soon this chaotic, moving mandala acquires a deep-green hue and the shape of soft fractals. The video seems to have gone beyond the frame of the monitor, beyond physical space.

Kristin Cammermeyer. Accumulation at 12th & Marion, 2015; site-specific mixed-media installation produced for stop-motion video at Hedreen Gallery, Seattle University. Courtesy of the Artist.

What Cammermeyer achieves with this developing expansion is a continuum of spatial experience past distinct borders. By blurring spatial edges, she also blurs their meanings and links them, insisting on mutual responsibility; a “psychic ecology” is rooted in the industrial, the natural, and the inchoate. Even the most abstract of spatial concepts has ties to the material. The linkages in the videos are reiterated in the installations, through which Cammermeyer responds to the physical spaces she is given. Such recursive gestures rely on the interconnection between a viewer’s physical body and one’s meta- and paraphysical experiences.

Kristin Cammermeyer. Accumulation at 12th & Marion, 2015 (detail); site-specific mixed-media installation produced for stop-motion video at Hedreen Gallery, Seattle University. Courtesy of the Artist.

Simply put, Cammermeyer’s work reveals ways in which we inhabit both real and imagined spaces. The intense piling of visual activity in her videos is a response to the slow, tangible changes she makes to her installations. Her videos and installations refer to and reflect one another, creating a jarring sense of combined embodiment and abstraction. A viewer not only is in the space, in the installation, but also is projected within a video of that very space as it develops into somewhere else altogether. While Cammermeyer splits one’s perspective through spatial and temporal disconnections, she insists that a viewer be able to occupy multiple subject positions at once. This flexibility demands sensitivity to a dialectic of dichotomous relationships: foreground and background, construction and deconstruction, structure and its abstraction. The artist’s continual reassertion of process and impermanence becomes a meditation on finitude and asks what might be gained by accepting paradox and perpetual motion as innate conditions of existence.

Kristin Cammermeyer. Double How: In and Out of the Back Room, 2013; site-specific mixed-media installation at Recology SF, San Francisco, CA. Courtesy of the Artist.

Kristin Cammermeyer is a multimedia artist based in Los Angeles. She received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Kristin has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Harpo Foundation, and the Toby Fund. She attended residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Recology SF, and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been published in New American Paintings and Hazlitt Print. Prominent exhibitions include the Broad Art Museum, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Hedreen Gallery, Klowden Mann Gallery, Machine Projects, and Elephant Art Space. Her work is in the Broad Foundation, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Recology SF, and the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive collections. She will be participating in the I-Park Site Responsive Biennale in East Haddam, Connecticut (May 15–June 4, 2017). In 2018, she will have a solo show at 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA. She can be found on Instagram: @kcammermeyer.

Lionel Cruet. Intangible Sites, 2016; audiovisual installation in shipping container; 96 x 120 x 98 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Some of his works become portals to other sites, exploring the possibility for one to have a geographic experience in absentia. Yet the geographic cannot be separated from the sociopolitical. In his piece Intangible Sites (2016), Cruet projects a series of still images and video clips given to him by the immigrant community of Taos, New Mexico, onto the back wall of a shipping container, suffusing the small space with reflected light. The voices of Cruet’s interviewees, some in English and others in Spanish, are heard, speaking to the landscapes projected on the wall. For example, two English speakers relate the images to particular memories of their earlier lives in the Dominican Republic and Mexico—remembering other places through their current landscape.

Lionel Cruet. Espacio Intangible (Intangible Space), exterior view sequence, 2014; audiovisual installation in shipping container; 84 x 120 x 96 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Much like Lauret Savoy’s autobiographical journey through the United States in her book Trace (2015), Cruet investigates the junctures between physical landscape, racial histories, and personal narratives. Yet while Savoy sought to uncover from the American landscape the buried stories of both the slaves and indigenous people from whom she was born, Cruet, in Intangible Sites, suggests that physical places hold alternative narratives, through immigrant experiences; the sites in question are perhaps not of the Southwest at all, but of places further afield.

Lionel Cruet. The Shade of a Paradise, 2015; digital print on photo paper; 20 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Through his works, Cruet asks about representations as failed reconstructions of place; he is curious about where the edges of images, ephemera, and memory overlap yet never seem to touch. In The Shade of a Paradise I (2015), Cruet layers digital images within their computer-program windows, creating a haphazard effect like a Google search for “the tropics.” The background image shows the dark undersides of palm trees, and over this are a swatch of a blue gradient, an image of a blue tarp, a low-resolution image of people climbing onto a boat, and a screen shot of descriptive and marketing copy for a tarp. The result is a collage that simultaneously conjures the shining fantasy of tropical islands and the reality of their relative poverty while never showing an image of the actual places. Cruet reveals a lexicon of associations that are used to refer to island nations but that—even when they are attuned to discourses of poverty and vulnerability—can never fully describe them.

Lionel Cruet. Islands, 2015; digital print on polyethylene vinyl stretched on canvas frame; 48 x 70 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

This associative weave results in pieces that gesture toward systems greater than their whole but do not attempt to make up for what they lack. Rather, the power of Cruet’s ouevre is in its ability to confer an almost indecipherable complexity through inference. In his work Islands (2015), Cruet looks at what is called “illegal offshore migration” and the intersecting ideation and realities of place. Islands is an unattributed color image of men captured during their attempt to enter the United States from the Caribbean, printed on a large piece of vinyl that conjures associations of tarps, camping, and rubber rafts. A black-and-white image of the tops of palm trees is partially superimposed at the bottom of the composition, and the colors of the clothes worn by the arrested men—bright pink, blue denim, nautical stripes—bleed through the palm fronds. The leaves conjure a memory of tropical places as well as a feeling of hiding within jungle undergrowth, creating a sense of simultaneous longing and danger. A border-patrol boat looms in the waters behind the men, and the muzzle of a machine gun pokes into the scene from the right side. Cruet creates a visual synecdoche, interweaving a series of narratives into one image, on the shore of this unnamed, but perhaps not unknown, nation, revealing the ways in which the ideal, the personal, and the geopolitical are intertwined in the construction of place. Ultimately, Cruet does not ask that the manifold layers of significance be pulled apart in order to be comprehended, but rather that they be felt together, as a whole composed of powerfully incomplete iterations.

Lionel Cruet. Horizons, 2015; inkjet print; 13 x 19 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Lionel Cruet was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and received a BFA from La Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Puerto Rico and an MFA from the City College of New York. He was the recipient of the Juan Downey Audiovisual Award in 2013 at the 11th Media Arts Biennale at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago, Chile. In 2015, his solo show, Lionel Cruet: In Between, Real and Digital, was presented at Bronx River Art Center in New York. His artwork has been in group exhibitions such as SuperReal: Alternative Realities in Photography and Video at El Museo del Barrio in New York, Colonial Comfort at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico and the Sound Art Fair at Sala de las Artes, Universidad de Sagrado Corazón in Puerto Rico, among others. In 2016 he participated in the AIM Program with the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and his projects have been published by Made in Mind magazine, Designboom, and Catálogodiseño magazine. His work focuses on subjects of geopolitics, economy, and technology, and uses experimental digital-printing processes, audiovisual materials, performance, and installations.

Molly Dierks. Parts, 2010; car parts, paint, metal and wood bases; dimensions variable; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist.

In her installation Parts (2010), Dierks erects three metal objects with evocative but nonspecific shapes and details. Painted a warm coral hue like lipstick or rouge, the forms suggest sections of mass-produced, utilitarian objects. Strangely feminized by their shapes and color, they appear like hybrids of car parts and pantyhose, fenders and legs. But what is strangest about them is how surprisingly natural it feels to a viewer to see both a car door and lipstick in the same object. Parts goes beyond a mere feminizing of typically masculine objects—the maligned “shrink it and pink it” ethos applied to marketing products to women. The congruity of these readings reveals a deeper entanglement between them, of seeing the production of a concept of a woman in the production of a car.

Molly Dierks. Parts, 2010 (detail); car parts, paint, metal and wood bases; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

The artist intensifies this entangled reading through her Hardbodies series (2012), in which the chromed and car-paint-dipped sculptures look like lipstick, pills, hair curlers, or vibrators. This linkage suggests not only that the ideation of woman is a cultural production, but also that industrial modes are required to effect it—that it’s not just the curled hair, the colored lips, or the Prozac smiles that produce the Stepford Wife aesthetic of normative femininity, but also the factories, machines, and electronics that make the objects that produce the curls and the colors. The end result, Dierks suggests, is like the attractively bright and unyielding Hardbodies. The shaped mirrors under these objects possess a seminal quality: They reflect the image of the sculpture, a commodity produced to reflect heteronormative male desire.

Molly Dierks. Hardbodies, 2012; wood, automotive paint, lathed aluminum, mirrors; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

Dierks’s Test Tube Babies (2016), meanwhile, appear to be failures or byproducts, the tailings of feminine production. These silvery, molten masses are squished, pitted, and burned, like ingots subjected to forces much greater than they can bear. They are also peppered with incongruously girlish details: pastel blotches like gobs of melted candy, tubing like a half-dead glow-stick bracelet, a pink plastic bag like a bubblegum balloon, sparkling rhinestones. They seem to be the tortured remnants of the ore of femininity, the raw material from which the commodified female is crafted.

Molly Dierks. Test Tube Babies, 2016; cast aluminum, paint, resin, urethane found objects; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

But whereas Parts and Hardbodies explore a relationship between the production of femininity and industrial goods, Test Tube Babies offers a way out of this bleak vision. The Test Tube Babies works do not evoke a sense of completion, unlike the sleek forms of the earlier works. Instead, they are abject and grotesque, a rejection of easy modes of consumption. As test forms for normative femininity, they may be failures, but as failures they express the possibility of liminal positions within industrial manufacturing, either of ideas or objects. For those seeking a path away from classification and gender essentialism, the Test Tube Babies offer a template—one less recognizable and perhaps more appropriate—for modes of being and becoming.

Molly Dierks. Test Tube Babies, 2016; cast aluminum, paint, resin, urethane found objects; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

Molly Valentine Dierks received a BA in behavioral psychology from Dartmouth College, a post-baccalaureate degree in sculpture and extended media from Virginia Commonwealth University, and an MFA in art and design from the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. She has participated in exhibitions nationally and internationally. Her work has been included in exhibitions by such institutions as the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, University of Michigan Museum of Modern Art, the Kunsthalle Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Fort Worth Community Arts Center. She is currently an assistant professor of fine arts at Tarleton State University, and she lives and works in Texas.

Patricia Smith. Upper Brooklyn Recovered Memory Tureen, 2014; ink, watercolor, graphite, collage on paper; 41 x 60 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

One can imagine that the Incidents maps are made in much the same way topographic maps are, with the spaces and situations felt out by the mapmaker and recorded as faithfully as her skill allows. By referring to actual geography, usually without declaring the place, a Smith map engages the attention of viewers who recognize the places by sight—presumably people who are familiar with and have connections to them. Though Smith’s references are deeply personal, her maps can tap rather intimately into her audience’s experiences, in a way formalizing a landscape of interpersonal qualia. With her maps, Smith declares the inextricable reciprocity between place and sensation, asserting that each is created and understood through the lens of the other.

Patricia Smith. Recovered Memory Incident, 2013; ink, watercolor, gouache, graphite pencil on paper; 25 x 19 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

This idea, of linking place and sensation, is perhaps most popularly recognized through the Situationist concept of dérive. First developed by Guy Debord in 1956 and meaning “to drift,” the dérive act was intended to disrupt normal experiences of urban spaces by refusing their prescribed modes and uses—allowing oneself to be attracted to certain areas or repelled by others, free from an objective or clear intent, and therefore presumably also free from the site’s imposed logic or use. A person’s resultant movements through the streets were often characterized as somnambulistic, their purpose derived from affective sensation rather than any external curriculum.

Patricia Smith. Dissolution Drift (Left Bank), 2013; ink, watercolor, graphite, charcoal pencil on paper; 25 x 19 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

But for a viewer of Smith’s maps—rather than moving in a dérive through the streets, allowing them to affect her feelings—the streets seem to move through Smith’s internal experience, their subsequent mappings influenced by, but not beholden to, any static geography. Her maps are delicate and without distinct edges, like a dream-state perception in which only the center of one’s attention holds. Similar to the dérive, her maps feel dreamlike and ethereal, but her functional reversal of the dérive concept privileges the psyche of psychogeography in a way that the Situationists did not, thus allowing for a record of Smith’s engagement with space. This act of mapping affective experience solidifies and, potentially, legitimizes what has always been considered too slippery to trust or believe: memory.

Patricia Smith. Marnix Incident, 2012; ink, watercolor, collage, rubber stamps on paper; 24 ¾ x 19 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

In works like Residue of a Violent Event (L.I.C.) (2014), Smith refers to an incident in her personal history, rooted in a specific location. In hazy watercolor, she sketches out the relevant geographic features: a short section of a river, split by a dark, thin island at its northern bend and trickling into narrower creeks to the east. Two bridges extend from the island to the shore like grasping tendrils. An uneven grid of a few streets is penciled onto the pointed corner of land between the main river and a creek. A stippled shadow hugs the wavering coastline and hovers like a miasma over the roughly drawn streets. Smith neatly labels the features recorded by her map, marking “The Murder” a few blocks away from “Tom Cat Bakery”; the black stipples are named “The Dark Heart of Things.” She maps the dispersal of these shadowy marks, noting “A Stagnant Pool of Grief,” “Absorption into Bread,” and “Absorption into Water.” At the bottom right, Smith inscribes the purpose of the work: “Noting the absorption level of negative vibrations over a period of 18 months.”

Patricia Smith. Residue of a Violent Event (L.I.C.), 2014; ink, watercolor, graphite, charcoal pencil on paper; 25 x 19 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

By making a record of something as intangible as “negative vibrations” across a recognizable drawing of Long Island City, Smith asserts the tactile effect of one’s internal landscape on the external. The logic of this claim is that subjective experience is not only an important aspect of reality, but also a shared one; we are not islands of personal multitudes, unknowable to one another, but rather are deeply interconnected through and by the spaces we inhabit together. Much like the dérive was meant to be a way to reclaim the streets from inhuman consumerist agendas, Smith’s maps are a way to reassert the power of intersubjectivity and a shared social reality.

Patricia Smith was born in Camden, New Jersey, and studied art at Rutgers University, Camden, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. She received her MFA from Rutgers University Mason Gross School of Art, New Brunswick, in 1984 and subsequently moved to New York City. She was active in the downtown Manhattan and East Village art scenes, exhibiting at such historic galleries as Sensory Evolution, Helio, Life Gallery, Cuando, Nico Smith, Limbo, Zeus Trabia, and Nite Gallery. She is currently represented by Front Room Gallery, where she has had four solo exhibitions since 2006. Venues of other solo exhibitions include Black + Herron Gallery, Saint Peter’s Church, A.I.R. Gallery, and Piezo Electric Gallery in New York; Croxhapox Gallery in Ghent, Belgium; and S.O.M.A. in Berlin, Germany. Her work was recently featured on the cover of You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography, published by the University of Arizona. She was awarded artist residencies for 2013 and 2015 at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and in 2014 was an artist-in-residence at Kaus Australis in Rotterdam. She was a 2014 New York Foundation of the Arts fellow in Drawing/Printmaking/Artist’s Books. She currently lives and works in Paris.

Brian Cooper. Meltdown, 2003 (front view); wood, upholstery, wall paper, synthetic stuffing, staples, zip ties, chicken wire, covered buttons; 20 x 14 x 14 ft. Courtesy of the Artist.

What’s so enjoyable about Cooper’s upholstered creations is that they are strangely gratifying while being vaguely repulsive. A viewer may experience a desire to lie upon the bulbous mass of Meltdown (2003) while very much wanting to avoid stepping in it. Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject comes to mind here, in which a subject viscerally rejects that which threatens the sense of symbolic order. This can be manifested in a disgust generated by the presence of vomit or clumps of hair; the disgust itself reasserts the symbolic order between self and other, but the object of the disgust maintains the power of a disruptive force. Cooper’s installations, suggesting a disco-era debauchery, don’t quite reach this point, but they iterate an abjection more closely tied to a sense of consumerist degradation—and are perhaps more poignant for the millennial population.

Brian Cooper. Meltdown, 2003 (rear view); wood, upholstery, wall paper, synthetic stuffing, staples, zip ties, chicken wire, covered buttons; 20 x 14 x 14 ft. Courtesy of the Artist.

The artist’s choice of fabrics and materials harken back to a particular moment in American history, one that simultaneously solidified expectations for normative home life while promoting cocaine-fueled fantasies. A viewer encounters Cooper’s Meltdown (2003) as a wall erected in the middle of a hallway. The front of the wall is papered with an Art Deco–like white-and-gray floral pattern. Oozing over the top and down in great drips is a cushiony mass of sickly yellow, dotted with upholstery buttons that emphasize its plush irregularity. If a viewer were to skirt around this obstacle, one could see the bulk of the lumpy mess spreading down the wood-paneled back of the wall and pooling across the gallery floor. A thin layer of mustard-colored material lies underneath the upholstered form on the wall, like a slug’s slime trail. While the upholstery techniques and wall décor refer to domestic interiors, the oozing cushion suggests the dissolution of the very comforts these spaces are meant to offer.

Brian Cooper. Gratification Management, 2004; upholstery, synthetic stuffing, staples, zip ties, chicken wire, covered buttons, metal buckets, carpet, wood paneling; 15 x 30 x 2 ft. Courtesy of the Artist.

The installations describe a failure of excess, a complicit inability to cope with the repercussions of having too much and being unable to stop. To now evoke the style of 1970s American homes is to recall an era on which much of the so-called millennials’ woes can be blamed: Was it not the poor economic choices made by that earlier generation that led to today’s insurmountable student debt, stagnant minimum wage, and chronic underemployment? When encountering a piece like Gratification Management (2004), it is hard not to see both the dorm-room drunk lying in a pile of his vomit as well as a generation of partiers who failed their descendants, fifty years ago. The abject relates to Cooper’s work not through Kristeva’s consumption but rather through base consumerism.

Brian Cooper. Gratification Management, 2004 (detail); upholstery, synthetic stuffing, staples, zip ties, chicken wire, covered buttons, metal buckets, carpet, wood paneling; 15 x 30 x 2 ft. Courtesy of the Artist.

The domestic forms suggested by Cooper’s goopy blobs recall dissolved furniture, craft objects unable to perform their basic functions for human comfort or use. Cooper explores the limitations of physical form to render the works as meditations on corporeality and the link between satisfaction and care. These pieces do not offer a pessimistic criticism of the body and consumption; rather, they encourage more subtle boundaries to be drawn between self and other, between the economy and the individual, and between past, present, and future.

Brian Cooper. Slow Down Fall Down, 2002; wood, upholstery, wallpaper, synthetic stuffing, staples, zip ties, chicken wire, covered buttons; 20 x 14 x 14 feet. Courtesy of the Artist.

Brian Cooper was born and raised in San Francisco and currently lives with his wife, the artist Susan Logoreci, in Los Angeles. He earned his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from the University of Southern California. Cooper’s work has been exhibited at several galleries in Los Angeles, including Acuna Hansen, Circus Gallery, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Fellows of Contemporary Art, and the Long Beach Museum of Art. Cooper’s work has been included in several shows in New York, including Hysterical Friction: Works on Paper from JAUS LA, at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Brooklyn. His work was exhibited in i:23 at the Yokohama Triennale in 2014, curated by Kio Griffith in Tokyo and Yokohama; in Ducks, curated by Ryan Travis Christian at Greenpoint Terminal Gallery in Brooklyn; and in Archaic Revival, curated by Dani Tull at Zic Zerp Gallery in Rotterdam in 2013. He has also shown his work at Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art, Green Gallery in Milwaukee, De Parel Gallery in Amsterdam, and the Torrance Museum of Art. A solo show of his work was at the University of California, Riverside. 

Fei Li. Entanglement: Trial 0, 2016; ink on paper; 48 x 36 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Li’s landscapes are fundamentally abstract, yet their linguistic evocations seem like conflations of written text and figurative image, despite being neither. Based on Li’s training in Chinese calligraphy from when she was two years old, the movement of her brushstrokes seems to call forth a visceral association with writing. They almost resemble metonymic Arabic calligraphy drawings, in which the word for a figure is written to stylistically resemble it. However, Li’s work refers not to a singular object or phrase but rather to a holistic sensation of movement and space. The result is a dynamic series of ink drawings that encourage a viewer to engage with a form of reading that precedes language, a paradoxical experience of translating without words. This is not to say that the work’s meaning is beyond words, but rather that it demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between words and meaning. Far from being unable to be articulated, Li’s landscapes feel like the beginnings of a new written language.

Fei Li. The Hidden Dimension and Other Observations No. 129, 2016; ink on paper; 60 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Redolent with associations, Li’s landscapes almost become Rorschach tests for their viewers. Evoking a certain kind of delirium, the brushstrokes suggest Chinese calligraphy, then jungle undergrowth, then British tea garden. In Hidden Dimension No. 135 (2016), the loose horizontal strokes in the center ground lap against tight verticals, sketching out what might be a pool of water surrounded by thick vegetation. Small, deliberate strokes read like hidden messages within the ink forest. The riot of movement would almost be chaotic if it were not so tightly ordered. Like hand lettering, the image feels scalable, as if it would be legible rendered as either a sweeping mural on the side of a building or etched in delicate blue lines on porcelain. The result is a piece lush with meanings, continually asserting the tight relationship between sense and interpretation.

Fei Li. The Hidden Dimension and Other Observations No. 135, 2016; ink on paper; 96 x 120 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Though many of Li’s pieces could be imagined as decorations on vases or dinnerware, they exist at an amplified scale, and the lyrical tension of her strokes shifts as a viewer’s body does in relation to the works. Li’s powerful, large-scale paintings overwhelm the human body; when viewed from a distance, they take on an impressionistic quality that is just as engaging. In Hidden Dimension No. 101 (2016), a chaotic landscape curls around a gallery corner, enveloping any viewer within its expanse; up close, a viewer becomes entangled in the active, looping marks that sketch out a vast and varied environment. But when the work is viewed from farther away, what once appeared like dense undergrowth or rushing water now looks like clouds or drifting fog. As with Claude Monet’s largest paintings of water lilies, one’s relative distance from Hidden Dimension No. 101 changes the meaning of the work, creating a tense and precarious meditative experience.

Fei Li. The Hidden Dimension and Other Observations No. 101, 2016; ink on paper; 84 x 204 in.; installation view Courtesy of the Artist.

But in certain works, Li does not allow for this meditative distance. The mirrored panels on the floors of Li’s installations restrict a viewer’s movement and force constantly fragmented encounters with the reflections of the pieces. Here, Li forges a relationship between a viewer and her work that she calls “a battle between moving and being moved,” between inherent and iterative signs. This intensifies the fundamental premise of Li’s Hidden Dimension series: Reading and interpretation are active, bodily engagements in both language and landscape, with distance, boundaries, and meanings constantly being drawn and redrawn in relation to a viewer’s position. Li’s work refuses fixed interpretations of either meaning or environment, capturing the almost entropic dynamism of nature and culture.

Fei Li. The Hidden Dimension and Other Observations, 2016; ink on paper, mirrors; dimensions variable; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist.

Fei Li is a Chinese artist who lives and works in New York. She studied with Lon Clark at the San Francisco Studio School and moved to New York in 2012. Li’s works have been shown internationally in museums and galleries, including the New Britain Museum of American Art in the United States, the Museum of Abbaye de Léhon in France, the Asian Culture Center in South Korea, and the Chinese European Art Center in China. She was awarded a 2016 Queens Arts Fund New Works Grant, funded by the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. She can be found on instagram: _fei_li_.

Ludovic Duchâteau. Prepper, 2014; plastic, epoxy, plaster, latex, copper, steel, acrylic; approx. 80 x 80 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

But Duchâteau’s work is a commentary not so much on technology but rather on technological fantasy. As digital and machine technologies become more complex, the objects become harder to interpret by visual analysis alone—who knows what really goes on among all those circuits and cables? In effect, high-tech objects may as well be alien to those who do not recognize their function. Visual interpretation fails to give sufficient information; what’s left is the visceral sensation, a viewer’s physical reaction to the object. If one cannot trust one’s senses to analyze an object or situation, the only recourse is ambivalence, a tension held indefinitely between fear and curiosity, security and danger. Duchâteau’s dejected sci-fi probes are the detritus of uncertain fantasies, a constant vacillation between the threat of technological power, the impotence of technological failure, and the inability to distinguish them.

Ludovic Duchâteau. Uncertain Messenger, 2014; plastic, epoxy, clay, latex, copper, steel, acrylic; approx. 3 x 22.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

This vacillation is felt most keenly in Duchâteau’s installations, where his objects can create a narrative within their settings. In Dynamic Confirmation (2016), a tentacular machine-object lies immobile in a construction zone, its black cables sprawled across the concrete. Its sleek, conic form suggests an object meant for flight, ill-suited for ground mobility. Its white plastic casing appears to be split, as if it had become dislodged from the impact of a crash landing. A bright construction light spotlights the object, and the viewer’s perspective, positioned behind a chain-link fence, makes the image read like a zone cordoned off by police. Though the crashed machine appears broken or disabled, there is ample room left around it, as if it might still be dangerous. Here, Duchâteau re-creates the wonder of a first-contact fantasy and tempers it with mechanical failure, as if our wildest dreams would be tainted by their realization. Dynamic Confirmation feels not unlike Neil Blomkamp’s 2009 film District 9, in which a Johannesburg filled with literal aliens is still banal and grossly human.

Ludovic Duchâteau. Dynamic Confirmation, 2016; plastic, epoxy, clay, latex, copper, steel, acrylic; dimensions variable; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist.

Perhaps what is most compelling about Duchâteau’s pieces is how well they are able to hold this tension, keeping in check both coarse realities and fictional anxieties. Somewhere in between these two extremes lies his newest work, In Dreamland (2016), an installation seemingly straight out of the same kinds of fantasies that produced the hit Netflix show Stranger Things. In this work, a ramshackle tarp tent is erected in the gallery space, accompanied by a Radio Flyer wagon full of books, with more piled around the tent. The setup is not unlike what a child fleeing the strictures of daily life might make, with a child’s essentials for escape: shelter and books. But from within the tent, beside a child’s prone form, extends a long, snaking tentacle; outside the tent, its color shifts from black to glowing orange. It seems that the sleeping child’s fantasies, the nightmares, have come alive and are creeping out into the world.

Ludovic Duchâteau. In Dreamland, 2016; epoxy, cotton, fiberglass, urethane foam, aluminum, acrylic, nylon, textiles, tent, tarp, Radio Flyer wagon, books; dimensions variable; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist.

Ludovic Duchâteau. In Dreamland, 2016 (detail); epoxy, cotton, fiberglass, urethane foam, aluminum, acrylic, nylon, textiles, tent, tarp, Radio Flyer wagon, books; dimensions variable; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist.

The same tension between sinister activity and prone vulnerability seen in Duchâteau’s probes are brought to life in In Dreamland, but this time the roles are split between two figures rather than inherent within a single form. Here, Duchâteau pulls apart the tangle of ambivalent desires packaged within technological objects and mythologizes them with a monster. But the relationship between the sleeping figure and the tentacle does not feel inherently dangerous—if anything, the child seems to be the least threatened by the lurching tendril. The suggestion here is not a resolution between wonder and reality but rather the potency of unknowability. The only way to make space for wonder is to accept the possibility of unknown consequences, perhaps even violent ones; the alien probe may be a precursor to invasion, or the only escape from reality may be a nightmare. But each of Duchâteau’s pieces holds that moment of ambivalence apart from the rest of the story, making room for greater possibilities yet to be imagined.

Ludovic Duchâteau studied visual arts in Paris, France. He spent several years envisioning interactive 3D software using behavioral models, with human–computer interactions as a creative resource. Before moving to the Bay Area three years ago, his sculpture, drawings, and installations were exhibited in Paris. His current work has recently been shown at The Lab in San Francisco, Oakland Art Murmur, and A Stark Project. Ludovic lives and works in the East Bay. He can be found on Instagram: ludovicduchateau.

Kyle J. Bauer. Radar, 2015; wood, streamers, paint; 86 in x 22.5 in x 19 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Whether they feel still or fluid, or both, Bauer’s pieces convey a strong sense of directionality. Upon looking at Mooring (2013), one might feel as though it were pointing to a specific place to which one might navigate, if only one could understand its symbols. The eye tends to read the piece from left to right, following the graphic black-and-white wavy lines through the mysterious, unyielding brown cube and shooting off along the strong diagonals of the bright orange dowels. Capsule-like porcelain cylinders hang from eyebolts screwed into the cube’s pegboard face, reading at once like cables in a switchboard and anchors or ballast. The effect is of an ongoing translation to which the viewer is not privy; the secrets of Mooring are safely protected by an inscrutable symbolism.

Kyle J. Bauer. mooring, 2013; wood, steel cable, fiberglass, slip-cast porcelain, paint; 98 in. x 108 in. x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Many of Bauer’s sculptures retain this sense of withheld information, despite their apparent simplicity and inviting colors. This is conveyed not only through familiar but enigmatic signs, but also through an energetic stillness, as if the works were kinetic objects forever at rest without the proper inputs. Composition |4 1 1| (2014) looks like a child’s toy, with its streamer pom-pom and beach-ball-like sphere atop a base tempting to be rocked, yet the precision of its form stops a viewer from pushing the whole thing over—clearly an object so strictly assembled was designed for something other than play, right?

Kyle J. Bauer. Composition |4 1 1|, 2014; slip-cast porcelain, wood, fiberglass, paint, metal, streamers; 84 in. x 32 in. x 16 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Bauer seems to give just enough information to entice a viewer into conceptual and bodily engagement, to grapple with what the works might mean. Even the names of the pieces suggest deeper layers of meaning that almost jog one’s memory into making the right connections. Perhaps by squinting at Tree Line | After Klimt (2013) one can make out something that recalls a particularly graphic piece by Gustav Klimt, or lines on trees that mark a water or snow level. Or perhaps it reminds one of a golf game in a fever dream.

Kyle J. Bauer. Tree Line | After Klimt, 2013; wood, Astroturf, fiberglass, paint; 56 in. x 12 in. x 12 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

But in formalism, meaning in its strictest sense is of course inconsequential. At the end, one is left with an arrangement whose intent may or may not be known, and which may or may not matter at all. The joy of Bauer’s work is in how its formal and conceptual gestures trigger a vague sense of recognition, even nostalgia, for illusive significance. For all of the intellectual dancing one might do around each piece, the works are ultimately just fun to look at. Bauer’s sculptures are pleasing without being vapid, offering positive affirmation for levity in minimalism.

Kyle J. Bauer. Composition |4 1 2|, 2013; wood, slip-cast porcelain, metal, steel cable, paint; 54 in. x 36 in. x 15 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Kyle Bauer moved to Baltimore after earning his MFA from Louisiana State University in 2011. His current body of work is an exploration that combines a metaphorical reference to maritime navigation with sculptural forms that convey balance, tension, and control. These mixed-media sculptures are conceived with an adherence to the formalist perspective of objects. He recently completed a three-year residency at Baltimore Clayworks and is a 2014 Sondheim Artscape Prize finalist, a 2015 Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grant Award recipient, and a finalist for the 2015 Miami University Young Sculptors Competition for the William and Dorothy Yeck Award. He has had recent exhibitions at the Walters Art Museum, Vox Populi, Flashpoint Gallery, Randall Scott Projects, McDaniel College, Arlington Art Center, School 33 Art Center, and Maryland Art Place.

Marcus James. Garnedd Ugain, 2015; graphite pencil on Fabriano paper; 950 x 750 mm. Courtesy of the Artist.

Named for the hills and mountains James hiked around Great Britain, the drawings depict spaces that are remote, austere, and difficult to access—all quintessential characteristics of places in which a supposedly natural experience can be had, which is to say places that feel removed from the strictures of culture, society, and technology. Such places are seen as offering reprieve from the overwhelming demands of human society, allowing people to get in touch with themselves again. The logic of this thinking necessitates a belief that both the person and the natural environment exist first as holistic states that are later shaped and marred by manufactured interventions; humans and nature are the raw materials that are distorted by culture and technology.

Marcus James. Great End, 2015; graphite pencil on Fabriano paper; 950 x 750 mm. Courtesy of the Artist.

But while James’s landscapes acknowledge this basic idea, his process presents a more complicated premise. After hiking to each peak and producing quick line drawings of his surroundings, James returns to his studio to render each sketch with specific, precise marks that seem to emulate computer renderings. In Bwlch Coch (2015), the rich textures of the landscape are conveyed by hatches, crosses, and polygons that play across negative space to produce a sensation of depth while maintaining a flatness inherent to repetitive, pattern-like strokes. James’s work seems to portray disparate layers of affective experience, linking his time spent alone on mountainous peaks to a controlled lexicon of symbols and marks that seem to be made by machine; this produces a level of depth and detail that simultaneously describes the landscape while abstracting it. His process belies the idea of fluidity between an experience of the natural world and its expression, suggesting that a landscape is itself a cultural production.

Marcus James. Bwlch Coch, 2015; graphite pencil on Fabriano paper; 950 x 750 mm. Courtesy of the Artist.

While most of James’s landscapes are black-and-white, some of his works are rendered with an almost Fauvist color palette that seems to lend greater artificiality to each mark, like a printer with unbalanced color. But, as in Fauvism, the strangeness of the colors are a rejection of realism, and with it a rejection of the possibility of objective representation. James’s artistic interpretation is not shy about the influence of technology on its production, both as the visual production of a landscape and as a production of the idea of landscape. In Bidean Nam Bian (2015), a huge swath of empty space cuts through the colorful marks like the work of an errant eraser tool in Photoshop. Perhaps the content not rendered within this swath was forgotten or deemed uninteresting to James, as compared to the scrubby brush and rocky crags. What reads like a mistake in image-editing software demonstrates how contingently the environment is experienced, raising suspicions against the possibility of ever knowing land that is untouched by humans; an experience of that land reveals a human touch, a production of meaning that draws upon a technological experience.

Marcus James. Bidean Nam Bian, 2015; colour pencil on Fabriano paper; 2000 x 1300 mm. Courtesy of the Artist.

James’s lush, precise renderings of landscapes are appealing in this moment of environmental crisis. They embrace the innately artificial relationship between human experience and the land. Each drawing admits limitations and imparts specificity; each shows that the human conception of the environment is always a technological one. By refusing to separate humanity and the creation of landscape, James’s drawings present a sense of responsibility to nature that ostensibly objective representations do not. His work posits a radical ethic that intertwines humankind, technology, and environment—one that demands a careful reflexivity from people toward all three components of this inextricable braid in order to achieve meaning.

Marcus James. Sloc Nan Uan, 2015; graphite pencil on Fabriano paper; 950 x 750 mm. Courtesy of the Artist.

Born in 1973, Marcus James was raised in the West Country of England by artistic parents who encouraged him to study life drawing from an early age. Marcus moved to London in 1993 and graduated from Central Saint Martins, a college of the University of the Arts London. He received an MA from the Royal College of Art, where he studied life drawing and anatomy in the morgue at the University Hospital. Marcus then worked on collaborations with the fashion houses Alexander McQueen, Chloe, Yves Saint Laurent, and Stella McCartney. He currently concentrates on fine-art projects for his upcoming exhibition, Transitions. A full collection of his newest screen prints can be seen at www.lyonandcampbell.com.

Rachel Wolfson Smith. Carnival, 2016; graphite and gold leaf on paper; 15 x 15 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Smith’s murals are cinematically obsessive and scopophilic in their visceral rendering. The sheer size of a work like Uccello II (2016) actively pulls a viewer into the scene of the drawing, asking that one bears witness to a fantasy of extremity. There is something revelatory about the multiplication of crashing bodies, mechanical parts, numbers, and symbols. By depicting such excess in tactile, monochromatic graphite—each stroke, smudge, and shadow visible—Smith produces a sense of solemnity that appears earnest, yet the straight-faced presentation is jarring in relation to the subject matter. An approach once employed for grandiose representations of legendary battles is here used for crashing motorbikes and cars, well recognized symbols of phallic power. While a viewer perceives the tropes of this style, the works seem to take an almost silly pleasure in such over-the-top imagery.

Rachel Wolfson Smith. Uccello II, 2016; graphite on paper; 48 x 96 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

This body of work is timely. The smoking wreckage in Monsters (2016) calls to mind J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash, which critiqued a media-saturated culture through its exploration of dark, psychosexual impulses. Like Crash, Monsters recognizes such an extrapolation while remaining frank about the necessity of its expression. Monsters is a night scene of vehicular carnage, with iconic Mustangs, Porsches, and Hummers crumpled into smoking piles. As collateral damage from the force of impact, broken signposts tip haphazardly across the cars. In the far right corner, one car is demolished beyond recognition; smoke from the burning hulk billows into the night air, the heat shimmers rendered in fervent strokes rippling across the sky. The piece wraps an interior corner of a gallery, enveloping a viewer as if she has just encountered the wreckage. Monsters provokes a series of overlapping responses: incredulity at the excessive scene, with such lavishly expensive cars; recognition that destruction on this scale does occur; pleasure in the expression of destructive power; and recognition of the absurd pictorial elevation of a car crash to the significance of an epic battle. The sum of these effects renders Monsters’ urgent inquiry into the violent desires of the capitalist subject accessible without simplifying their often incompatible conjunctions.

Rachel Wolfson Smith. Monsters, 2016; graphite mural on paper; 120 x 252 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Rachel Wolfson Smith. Night, 2016; graphite and gold leaf on paper; 15 x 15 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Smith’s exploration of the displacement of aggression and desire within capitalist social reality can be seen in other contemporary cultural productions, many of which are post-apocalyptic in theme. With cars and motorcycles glimmering out of murky depths, Night (2016) looks like a scene from George Miller’s film Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). The post-apocalyptic fantasy presents a world left in ruins after the collapse of capitalism; while symbols of power continue to speak to ideas of violence and social domination, a disordered world uses those symbols to enact what they had formerly only made reference to. In Smith’s work, the elevation of this kind of frenzy to the style of sacred and historical paintings offers both a knowing nod to the absurdity of such desire and an urgent concern that absurdity may be all that remains.

Rachel Wolfson Smith. Bound to Earth, 2015; graphite on paper; 54 x 96 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Rachel Wolfson Smith is a full-time artist living and working in Austin, Texas. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, she earned her BFA in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA in painting from Indiana University. After following the Corot trail in Italy as an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant recipient, she spent six years as a professor at Indiana University and Western Oregon University. She has been an artist-in-residence at Halka Sanat in Istanbul and the Babyan Culture House in Ibrahimpasa, Turkey, and will spend the next six months creating permanent works for six fire stations as the recipient of the AFD Residency Grant through Austin’s Art in Public Places program. She can be found on Instagram: @wolfsonsmith.

Ewa Doroszenko. Image from the series The Promise of Sublime Words, 2016; digital print; size variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

By proposing such questions, The Promise of Sublime Words asks a viewer to consider whether the production process of an image matters. Doroszenko created the series through a variety of methods, including collage and both digital and physical manipulation. She has employed many methods of image making: taking photographs of textbook illustrations, printing the photographs, physically manipulating the prints, placing them in a tableau, taking photographs of the scene, and then digitally manipulating those photos. This multilayered approach frustrates a viewer’s ability to discern which part of the image was created by the artist’s physical hand and which via digital proxy. The final images exist digitally and can be printed at varying sizes. The fluidity with which Doroszenko works across these modes insists that a viewer reckon with the existential: What is real and what is simulation, and what does it mean if you can’t tell?

Ewa Doroszenko. Image from the series The Promise of Sublime Words, 2016; digital print; size variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

Such confusion extends to the abstract content of the series. It is difficult to describe what is going on in each of the images. In one, a feminine figure depicted in a black-and-white negative appears to hold a partial paper mask of a bearded statue over her face. Yet at one corner of the mask, there appears to be a folded piece of paper adorned with another ambiguous image; its placement confuses the eye’s perception. If one’s eyes follow the edge of the mask, it becomes unclear which piece of paper the model is holding—or if she is holding anything at all. The inverted tones of the negative image further distort the steps in the production of the image; the aspects that were staged in situ versus those digitally manipulated and added later are difficult to identify. The muddling of classical-art figures within Doroszenko’s dizzying collages symbolically throws traditional aesthetic meaning into a blender, leaving viewers to parse the work’s existential arguments on their own.

Ewa Doroszenko. Image from the series The Promise of Sublime Words, 2016; digital print; size variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

Though most of the recognizable figures in the series come from distortions of classical Greco-Roman sculptures, there is something quite cyberpunk about The Promise of Sublime Words. Like that science-fiction genre, one of the ultimate questions of the series is the relationship of the body to media. Perhaps the only arguable distinction between digital and analog is what the hand can touch: If the work itself can move so effortlessly between the screen and real space, where does a viewer stand, both literally and figuratively, in relation to such fluid pieces? Is the physical necessarily left behind, abstracted in translation to the digital screen? Perhaps the muddling of analog and digital processes in Doroszenko’s work is not an assertion of loss (or freedom, depending on where one stands on that ontological divide), but rather one of imbrication. The Promise of Sublime Words could not exist without both the tangible and the intangible. Maybe an answer to Doroszenko’s existential questions is nestled between the digital and analog paper cuts and folds, each wholly inextricable from the other.

Ewa Doroszenko. Image from the series The Promise of Sublime Words, 2016; digital print; size variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

Ewa Doroszenko received her doctor of fine arts degree from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland. She collaborated with the Centre of Contemporary Art in Torun, Poland, and was nominated to STRABAG ArtAward International in Vienna (2014) and 7th INCUBARTE International Art Festival in Valencia (2015). Her projects have been presented at Transmission Arts Festival Athens 2016, FILE 2015 Electronic Language International Festival in Sao Paulo, Biennale of Digital & Internet Art nfcdab in Wroclaw, ISEA – 21st International Symposium on Electronic Art in Vancouver, 9th IN OUT Festival in Gdansk, and GENERATE! Festival for Electronic Arts in Tübingen, among others. She has exhibited at Kasia Michalski Gallery in Warsaw, Centre of Contemporary Art in Torun, FAIT Gallery in Brno, and the Starak Family Foundation in Warsaw. She often collaborates with her husband, Jacek Doroszenko, who works with sound in visual art. She lives and works in Warsaw.

Meeson Pae Yang. Index, 2005–06; steel, glass, fluorescent lights, Plexiglas, sucrose solution, vinyl tubing, electrical components, vacuum-sealed packaging, latex, silicone, silicone tubing, polyurethane, trimmer line, nylon fittings; 78 x 114 x 36 in. Courtesy of El Camino College, Torrance, CA, and the Artist.

While many artistic projects that aim to integrate scientific subject matter often turn into rote demonstrations of a technological gimmick, or misunderstand the critical thrust of artistic practice, Yang’s subtle work conveys a sensitivity to aesthetic experience and demonstrates the ways in which art informs scientific vision. In Index (2005–06), a site-specific installation in the Sculpture Garden at El Camino College in Torrance, California, multiple vacuum-sealed bags full of sucrose solution float within a glass vitrine, and tubing runs from their openings to perforations in the vitrine’s walls and base. The effect is clinical: The orderly arrangement of plastic sacs reminds a viewer of intravenous bags in hospitals, the mainlining of vital nutrients into sickly bodies. The vitrine’s transparency invites one to compare the piece to the backdrop of lush, green plants in the nearby garden. Rather than propose a clear division between nature and technology, Index gestures to shared biological processes. Sucrose solution is often fed to plants to help them grow; the transfer of nutrients requires the same basic systems, whether that system be roots or medical tubing. This is not so much a comparison of the differences between the organic and synthetic but rather an assertion of systems as signifiers of affective meaning.

Meeson Pae Yang. Entity, 2006–07; video projection, stereo sound, thermoformed Plexiglas, LEDs, aluminum, electrical components, vinyl tubing, sucrose gel beads, resin, nylon fittings, polyurethane; 120 x 180 x 180 in. (dimensions variable). Courtesy of the Artist.

Yang’s material explorations using multiples reiterate the similarities between certain artistic practices and biological processes. The multiplication of structures ultimately produces a larger aggregate body. What often aesthetically separates the technological from the natural is an imposition of order; the former is presumed to be organized and predictable, and the latter chaotic and random. Entity (2006–07), like Index, moves away from these normalized oppositions and instead articulates a structural familiarity across both systems. The work’s orderly grid of identical Plexiglas pods reads like a clinical study, and the pods look almost like biological experiments under glass. A closer look at the pods reveals that plastic tubing is plugged into topographical maps on their bases. Entity asserts order only at one scale: Taken as a whole, the light and sound effects of the room pull a viewer into an immersive sculptural environment, but each pod refers to an environment larger than itself. The work suggests that only one way of looking implies technological control; all others point to a greater system.

Meeson Pae Yang. Merge (IV), 2016; hand-cut Mylar, ink, salt crystals; 32 x 80 x 3 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Such orderly arrangements are not necessary components of Yang’s work, yet structure is always an important part of her practice. In Merge (IV) (2016), Yang uses the material interactions between ink, Mylar, and salt to produce the work’s organic shapes and pigments. Merge (IV) records natural processes, but Yang’s thoughtful interventions produce a biological aesthetic. Though the ink pools result from a passive, physical interaction, Yang’s active cutting, layering, and arranging of the results evoke the chaotic and unpredictable. One argument of Merge (IV) could be that the aesthetic of a natural process can be a cultural production; one must be as suspicious of assumptions of the natural as those of the synthetic.

Meeson Pae Yang. Submerge, 2012; urethane, Plexiglas, reflections; 12 x 45 x 95 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

The critical fascination of Yang’s oeuvre is the layering of signification and meaning within systemic knowledge. It is not a simple inversion of the organic and synthetic, but rather an exploration of the visual and affective cues that produce the recognition of a system: Which structures produce which meanings? What reads as technological or natural? Systems always point both inward and outward, toward both their constituent parts and their larger wholes. Yang’s work asserts that all systems—biological, medical, artificial—are also systems of signification.

Meeson Pae Yang was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She received her BFA in 2002 from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her solo exhibitions and projects have been shown internationally at Galerie Kashya Hildebrand (Zurich, Switzerland), ArtHK (Hong Kong, China), ARCO (Madrid, Spain), Contemporary Istanbul (Istanbul, Turkey), and Art Stage Singapore (Singapore), and nationally at LAUNCHLA (Los Angeles, CA) and Blythe Projects (Los Angeles, CA). Her group exhibitions include FuXin Gallery (Shanghai & Miami), Galerie Agentur 162 (Essen, Germany), Art 1307 (Naples, Italy), Eli Klein Fine Art (New York, NY), Kala Art Institute (Berkeley, CA), and Harvard University’s Carpenter Center (Cambridge, MA).

Sarah Beth Woods. She Bun, 2016; hair weave, chain, door-knocker earrings; 13 x 4 x 9 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

The BRAID/WORK series primarily consists of hair weaves and jewelry coiffed and pinned to foam forms. In She Bun (2016), two perfect chignons seem to float on the wall, with gold “door knocker” earrings woven into the black hair, connected by a thin gold chain. She Bun is almost minimalist in its presentation; like minimalism, it redirects one’s fascination with its precision to its constituent forms. Seeing the abstracted artificial hair and jewelry, a viewer is prompted to read the work’s material—one that, for all its artificiality, distinctly conveys race and gender.

Sarah Beth Woods. BRAID/WORK, 2016; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Rootwork Gallery.

Woods admits a fascination with the boundaries between perceptions of the artificial and the natural. It is at these intersections that she begins her collaboration with Traore. But their work concerns more than just a distinction between, say, real and fake hair, or real and fake gold; it explores the technological artifice of gender and the gestural iteration of race. Their work challenges the assumption of biologically constructed identities.

Seen alongside the sculptural pieces are photographs by Cecil McDonald, Jr., an artist interested in masculinity and Black culture, of a braiding performance by Woods and Traore that took place on May 13, 2016, at a warehouse space on Chicago’s West Side. During this event, the Brooklyn- and Nairobi-based artist Celmali Jaime Okonji recited poetry about hair while Woods and Traore worked. These photographs serve not only to document the performance but also to reiterate the critical thrust of the series: There is nothing natural or innate about womanhood or Blackness, and the performance of these identities takes real time, labor, and community to create.

Sarah Beth Woods. A Big Diamond, 2016; hair weave, foam, door-knocker earrings; 67 x 7 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

This is not to say that race and gender are mere constructions and therefore irrelevant or that they operate identically. Rather, Woods’ work probes at the real boundaries that spring up around these markers of identity. Woods is a white woman who grew up in a primarily Black, middle-class neighborhood of Chicago, and she is highly cognizant of the dangers of appropriation her privilege affords. BRAID/WORK could be read almost voyeuristically, as the desire of white racial power to take the prettiest parts of the ethnic other for itself and discard the less appealing realities of systemic racial abjection.

But with works like A Big Diamond (2016), Woods confronts this desire with her sensitivity to feminist intersectionality. She simultaneously accepts the seductiveness of the abstracted forms of the racial other while she rejects its accessibility to her. The wreath-like form of A Big Diamond bears the braided trappings of Black hair and Black styling, but its decorative ornamental shape emphasizes their superficiality. Woods can shape and mold and braid Black hair, but cannot be Black. The whole of BRAID/WORK explores the limitations of experience in a racist, patriarchal society, but the series also opens up space for more complex interactions beyond complete stratification.

Sarah Beth Woods. DBL RAINBOW SWEET TWIST, 2016; hair weave, foam, photo collage, comb, door-knocker earrings; chain; 50 x 10 x 9 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

The performance aspects of BRAID/WORK insist that the sculptures, for all their formal beauty, are floating signifiers for identities that are more than merely aesthetic. They are parts of an iterative whole, in which the constituent parts are continually reasserted from outside and from within. Woods and Traore show that it takes more than a weave and jewelry to be a woman; it takes work.

Sarah Beth Woods is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist who uses the languages of craft, sculpture, and public engagement to explore the body by employing material culture, artifice, and adornment. Woods studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she focused on assemblage and interdisciplinary studies before returning to Chicago, where she earned a BFA at Northern Illinois University and an MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Her work has been included in shows at the University of Michigan’s Work:Detroit space; Girls Club, Fort Lauderdale, Florida; A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, New York; the Bob & Roberta Smith Kunstverein at Coventry University, England; New York University, Florence, Italy; and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Matt Lee. Untitled, from Presence of Absence, 2011; archival inkjet print; 14.2 x 21.3 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

In the aptly named series Presence of Absence (2011), emptiness is a figurative entity intruding upon the mundane. Lee created this series in response to his move to Bangalore, as he tried to make sense of his new home. A viewer might imagine the artist being surrounded by signs full of meaning but rendered meaningless by unfamiliarity. In the series, absence is made into an insistent material presence. As this looming void becomes more tangible and undeniable, its character becomes almost approachable. In some works, there is an endearing shyness to the black masses peering over rooftops or peeking around buildings. Lee does not so much demystify oblivion as render it surprisingly friendly.

Matt Lee. Untitled, from Presence of Absence, 2011; archival inkjet print; 14.2 x 21.3 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

Likewise, Lee’s Death Landscapes (2008–) feel oddly familiar despite their vague forms. Given Lee’s background in commercial illustration, all of his images have a distinctly graphic quality that makes elements of his work identifiable despite the fact that they address the fundamentally unknowable. The playfulness of Death Landscapes comes less from a direct characterization of death than from the oblique admixture of the abstract and the recognizable. A collage from Death Landscapes II (2015) is an eerie landscape, with ghostlike tendrils drifting upward from a dark island on the pale page. But from the center of this mass juts a bright rectangle on a pole—part stadium lights, part marquee, part basketball hoop. The result is a disjunction that feels playfully absurd, simultaneously serious and silly. The work’s formal reference to signage flirts with a critique of capitalism before it veers past the political and into the existential. It seems to say, “Sure, commercialism is absurd, but how about death?”

Matt Lee. Untitled, from Death Landscapes II, 2015; cut paper; 8.9 cm x 11.4 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

Matt Lee. Untitled, from Death Landscapes II, 2015; cut paper; 8.9 cm x 11.4 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

In his Death Landscapes, Lee’s characterization of the incongruities between the unidentifiable and the concrete produces an effect that is pleasantly somnambulistic in its strangeness. The viewer is asked to accept an unknown element as part of the visual lexicon, inviting it to become familiar while remaining mysterious. In one piece, a rocky black outcropping reminds one of a gate to the underworld, but the billboard-like sign above it complicates any sense of solemnity the form may suggest. This juxtaposition does not make the landscape more comprehensible, but it does make it less frightening. The artist’s overall proposition is a consent to the liminal—an uneasy assumption that the unknown is not necessarily an existential threat but rather simply curious.

Matt Lee. Untitled, from Death Landscapes III, 2016; cut paper; 13.8 x 18.3 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

Lee’s most recent series, Death Landscapes III (2016), is a more somber affair. Using collaged plain paper to suggest landscapes, these works lack the graphic juxtaposition of color photographs and black shapes that had given his previous works their liveliness; they instead convey a more tactile exploration. Their physical qualities of light and shadow reveal the landscape forms within a funereal cast of bone white. But while this series loses the playfulness innate to many of Lee’s other pieces, it gains a material presence. Here, Lee’s expression of absence is most tangibly felt—the void an extension of material form rather than a refutation of it. This is the ultimate ethos of Lee’s work: that strangeness is familiar, that the unknown is recognizable, and that the void is undeniably present.

Matt Lee is an artist, illustrator, design consultant, and educator. His work has been published by Gestalten, Creative Review, and NY Arts, and has been exhibited across North America, Europe, and Asia, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Mall Galleries in London, and the Alla Prima International Art Fair in Delhi. Originally from the United Kingdom, Lee currently lives in Bangalore, in southern India. He has a passion for Indian matchboxes, surf music, and preppy clothes. He can be found on Instagram (@mattrdlee) and Twitter (@_mattlee_).