Jonathan Runcio. Glass in the Garden, 2013; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco.

In his latest exhibition, Jonathan Runcio gives the viewer fragmented artifacts from the urban landscape: cement, steel, enamel, and glass. Here, Runcio returns to many of the themes of his earlier work—in particular, an interest in exploring the materials of the urban environment. In Glass in the Garden, Runcio pairs these materials with images sourced from Arts & Architecture magazine’s pioneering mid-century experiments in residential home design: the Case Study Houses.

Standing aloof in one corner of the gallery, Runcio’s Cast-Off Lamp 02 (2013), a stark approximation of a streetlight with a slim brass post and exposed industrial bulb, anchors the exhibition firmly in the streetscape. Untitled (Message) (2013) features a sheet of tarnished brass screen printed with overlapping and ultimately unrecognizable images of the Case Study Houses. Crumpled and discarded on the floor like rubbish, the sculpture underscores the end of a certain kind of built landscape. The effect of the overall installation of the artist’s sculptures plays doubly: Runcio has either positioned viewers amid the wreckage of a post-apocalyptic landscape, or he has placed us in the formative stages of new construction.

A similar level of tension plays out in the individual pieces themselves, with the artist variously pairing angular, highly engineered pieces of glass, mirror, and steel with raw hunks of concrete. For example, in Untitled (2013), the artist attached a steel armature painted with white enamel to a concrete base. While the piece is interesting enough on its own—in the way it marks the reduction of architectural elements to their most basic level—the silhouette of the sculpture also evokes a skeleton of a building, emphasizing precariousness between the states of construction and decay.

In a limited-edition artist’s book produced in conjunction with the show, Runcio borrows a page from Ghosts, a novel by César Aira about an unfinished Buenos Aires high-rise inhabited by ghosts covered in concrete dust. Similarly, Runcio’s artworks play out for the viewer as concrete shades, remnants that remark on a changing urban landscape. Ultimately, the artist’s work in Glass in the Garden carefully dismantles the architecture of the city, peeling back the glossy finish to show the viewer the raw substrate in gray, black, and cobalt.

Glass in the Garden is on view at Romer Young Gallery through December 14, 2013.

With Cinder Blocks We Flatten Our Photographs, installation view, Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco, 2013. Courtesy of Romer Young Gallery

The notion of the photograph has been largely displaced by that of the image. Images are origin-less: endlessly reproducible and malleable, their content easily manipulated and re-presented. With Cinder Blocks explores the contemporary parlance by which photography reestablishes its physical parameters. It begins with process-driven explorations of exposure and gesture in which the image’s generative action is synchronous to its subject. Examples of this are Daniel’s silver gelatin prints, Untitled (Portrait) and Untitled (Profile Portrait) (all works 2013 except where noted), and Pearson’s Untitled (No. 2), a wall-hung cyanotype on silk and cotton fabric. To make his works, Daniel presses his face into the photographic paper, exposes, and then flattens the paper so that it records the creases and folds as shadows and peaks. Alternatively, Pearson draped his treated fabric on the desert floor; one sees the traces of dust or sand across the surface but also the rocks that held the edges down for the duration of the exposure. In an e-mail to gallery owner Joey Piziali, Pearson notes that while “photographs always look AT something, these cyanotypes are more an attempt to record being IN something.”[3] Both Daniel and Pearson depend on the direct contact of objects with photosensitized material to create records of their actions.

Jonathan Runcio. Model 3, 2012; steel, primer, concrete, and screenprint, 49 x 33 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco

Pearson’s cyanotype also highlights a contradiction that prevails in the exhibition and is noted in its title: the spatial presence of the sculptural objects is undermined by the photographic impulse to flatten. The white traces marking the place where rocks held down the fabric’s edges conjure the vision of it laid on the ground and compete with its fluid draping; I had a strong urge to reorient it from wall to floor. Nearby is Corner by Spertus, an ink-jet print mounted on plywood that depicts the actual corner between the two works. But Corner hovers between image and installation; the sculpture’s right angles abut the wall like a two-page spread of an open book. The contradictory impulse is most evident, though, in Runcio’s concrete-and-steel sculpture located at the front of the gallery. Model 3 (2012) is a wire armature of sharp angles and strict proportions supporting a concrete beam that slices through it; on one face of the beam is a barely discernible image screen-printed in bright yellow. Despite the architectural lexicon that defines its form—and which obtusely references the Case Study Houses that serve as its source material—the screenprint firmly orients the sculpture with a frontal position; one has to see it head-on to absorb the image.

Deric Carner. Kylix, 2013; pigment print on brushed aluminum, unique; 15 x 12 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco

In other words, in each of these works the materiality of the form calls into account the subject of the image and vice versa. Or more precisely, the material demands to be reckoned with as the artist “fuses the literal or symbolic component of the photographic image with a specific form,” as Bunnell notes.[4] For example, Satyr and Kylix, Carner’s pigment print collages of images taken from the antiquities collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, rely upon the seamlessness between the image’s original gray background and the brushed aluminum on which they are mounted to craft both an illusion of depth and a logic of seeing the disrupted and reassembled object. Similarly, in Flaming Gorge Concrete Tondo, by Wilson, the deep fissures and folds molded into the concrete disc create both a rhythmic tension and a tangible sense of place for the image it bears of the stratified Wyoming canyon of the title. Both artists displace their subjects from context or orientation but re-embed them in a physical form that suggests an elapse of time and space and action; their origins are reinvented rather than translated.

Letha Wilson. Flaming Gorge Concrete Tondo, 2013; concrete, C-print emulsion transfer; 11 1/2 x 11 1/2 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco

In this sense, they bear affinity to the least sculptural work in the room, Guardiola’s untitled assemblage in which a photograph of two green bottles is hung adjacent to a small shelf on which stands one bottle filled with the shards of another. It immediately recalls numerous conceptual precedents, and its inclusion in With Cinder Blocks functions as a linchpin for the multiple dialogues unfolding in the show. One produces a photograph through a framing mechanism as well as a recording gesture. In each of the included works, that frame is not one we peer into but one we construct from process, material, and positioning and that enables us to be present with the subject rather than simply looking at it.

With Cinder Blocks We Flatten Our Photographs is on view at Romer Young Gallery through July 27, 2013.

[1] Photography into Sculpture was also re-created in 2011 by L.A. gallery Cherry and Martin as part of the Getty Foundation’s citywide Pacific Standard Time series of exhibitions.

[2] Peter Bunnell, Photography into Sculpture, exhibition wall label (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), np.

[3] From email exchange with Joey Piziali, shared with author on July 8, 2013.

[4] Bunnell, ibid.