Sept 6 - Oct. 12, 2012
Here is a man who
loves making things. So much so that he created an entire world out
of them. And this must be what people mean when they say art has the
potential to envision an alternate reality: Leonardo Drew, at Sikkema
Jenkins & Co., has paved a window into a strange civilization
that bears an uncanny resemblance to our own.
I use the word
civilization because his massive constructions (both standing or
wall-mounted) manifest undeniable traces of human industry and skill.
A quick glance might suggest an impression of an arbitrary assemblage
of found material (especially the charred and painted barricade), but
a second look definitively rejects this initial impression to one’s
embarrassment: his work is the result of such careful and painstaking
labor that it appears almost neurotically obsessive. One can imagine
Drew’s eyes burning up in pain as he sits in his studio for weeks,
months, years, diligently cutting plywood into hundreds of perfectly
two-by-two squares or one-inch-long splinters, then placing each
piece, anointed with a dash of glue, into their own spot part of one
giant, densely packed sculpture. I think of Yayoi Kusama hypnotically
carving out circles on her canvases for days, or your grandma sewing
away at another one of her quilts.
The installations
also exude a kind of ghostly grandeur of ancient ruins. The striking
element is the work’s pastness: this extinct community no longer
exists, but there is no doubt that they did. One can perceive their
mark not only through the pure scale of the remnants (the space of
the gallery barely provides adequate room to contemplate the entirety
of a given work from a distance), but also through the confident
assertion of their power: imposing barricades tower over the viewer,
phallic forms raise their manes and roar at the passerby, the
intricacy of the work indicate discipline and pride of the maker’s
own craft. The viewer navigates the space of the gallery with the
fascination of exploring The Natural History Museum and their display
of artifacts, perhaps from our own lineage. The wall sculptures’
intrusions into our space excite us like an encounter with the (fake)
giant whale or a shark’s head: their presence is awe-inspiring but
we constantly affirm that the immobile structures pose no actual
threat. We can still regard them from the safety of our own
positions.
But it is our
imagination that causes the most tension: who were these people and
what happened to them? They had a magnificent respect for the natural
world—barely altered tree trunks and roots twist and turn out of
their fixed spots, the man-made splinter pieces assume pulsating
organic forms—yet it was a time after plywood’s invention and the
sure signs of industry, such as the bolted pieces constructed from
exact measurements (Number 159, 2012 is starkly aluminum).
Some wall pieces, made mostly of flat rectangular or square cuts of
plywood, read like blueprints of a city to be built or
reconstructions of existed sites. In Number 162, 2012, for
example, pieces of thick, hand-made paper provide a base for a
gridded city bordered by a monstrous black forest; outside of the
human habitation lie suggestions of water (smeared blue paint) and
hills, along with neat groupings of rusted cotton and solidified mud.
The city grid is a tactic employed to maximize space for a large
population; yet these people leave untouched the gnarling
forest—clawing its way into the viewer’s space—that seems
capable of swallowing up the city itself.
Drew’s work is
full of such strange juxtapositions: the dichotomies of our
contemporary world—nature vs. industry—exist side by side, a
condition that is increasingly difficult for us to imagine. In purely
formal elements, too: from a distance, his large splinter pieces give
the illusion of being plush and even inviting (starfish/flower-like
Number 160, 2012), but an examination of the actual materials
proves otherwise, not to mention the violently perpendicular
eruptions of longer pieces from the wall. We live in an age of the
modern globalized city, where nature is clearly marked off (parks,
gardens, potted plants) from central human activity. Dichotomies
exist almost like a necessity.
But there is
another layer of strangeness. This civilization seems to have been
built using remnants of a people that have existed prior to it; the
materials could have been the discarded or destroyed materials of
another begone age. For example, a substantial portion of Number
161, 2012 utilizes visibly broken wood that have not been cut
into perfect measurements like many of his other works. Yet this
site, too, is what remains as an evidence of its own past, abandoned
in middle of construction. At the end of its trajectory into the
inner gallery space, the structure seeks the support of a wall while
the large beams that might have provided that role lean against
another. The result is a double removal of time: we see both a corpse
and the ghost that haunted it. But that ghost—could it have been
from somewhere in our time? The attempt to assign Drew’s people to
a specific point in our known history consistently fails us;
ultimately, we only end up in exhaustion after fruitlessly spinning
around and around, chasing our own tails.
But there is a way
to accept this world: by rejecting a linear history. Drew allows us
to escape the rigid structure of cause and effect—where we know all
that’s been said and done—into a floating concept of time, where
anything could be said and done, and perhaps has been already.
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