Jeph Gurecka – Colleen Becker

Jeph Gurecka, Skull Fondue (Momento Mori), 2002. A Fondue banquet in a slaughterhouse cooler, open to the public, Cheese Fondue, Head Cheese, and Pates were served. Courtesy of artist.

Jeph Gurecka has his eye on the bigger picture. While some of his artwork could be aligned with an aggressive, counter-cultural attitude, it all nonetheless speaks to human concerns such as the cycle of life, the role of memory and nostalgia. Gurecka typically works with media already invested with conventional significance, but that also resonate with his private mythologies. Older works were studies in the course of organic decomposition, while his latest pieces–paintings made from basic materials such as salt and earth–are as ephemeral as dust in the wind. These are photographed or otherwise "fixed," and, in some instances throughout his career, his artistry has consisted of nothing more than an act of selection, arrangement and documentation. He views his latest series of paintings and correlative photographs entitled "Salt, Soil, and Ash," which was on view at Brooklyn’s 31Grand Gallery as a material and conceptual departure from an earlier body of work, signaling a decidedly new direction for his art making practices.

Always drawn to materials that can be transformed by automatic processes, Gurecka’s earlier experiments mediated a cynicism articulated through the physical self-destruction of form. Stolen from porches after Halloween, the jack-o-lanterns of his on-going piece entitled Brooklyn, for example, were cast in Bondo plastic and allowed to rot. Mimicking the smirk of his subject matter, his sophomoric misdemeanors resulted in casts that preserve for posterity the ludicrous forms of moldering gourds as well as the childish, whimsical folk art of pumpkin-carving. Like traditional Mexican sugar skulls made to commemorate the Day of the Dead, works featuring comestibles like Skull Fondue, a dinner setting featuring loaves of bread baked into anatomically correct imitations of the human skull, allude to the cycle of life and an acceptance of the inevitable through the act of consumption. Open to the public, and held in an abandoned cold storage locker in the Meat Packing District, the dramatic, and somewhat sinister, flourishes of Gurecka’s table transfigure the site of a normative social ritual–dinner with friends–into a stage set for a communal performance with cannibalistic associations. Although his attention to materials is clearly indebted to contemporary Western precedents such as Earth and process-based art, in these older pieces, his referencing of vernacular forms and practices verges on the ironic.

Caustic undertones are absent entirely from his latest body of work, which he began while visiting the Czech Republic. From the 2,000 photographs he took there, 10 were translated into paintings or drawings, and the drawings were then re-shot as photographs–completing, in a conceptual way, their own cyclical development. He does not regard the resulting photographs as final products per se, so much as he views the entire process as a work of art, parts of which are always lost as a consequence of the instability of their media. Monochromatic paintings like The Peach Eater demonstrate his working methods: from the images captured on film, Gurecka maps out areas of high contrast in salt, soil, ash, charcoal, cement and flocking, which he then calcifies through the application of archival resin. As with earlier works, these rely upon the "happy accident" for their production–in this case, the natural transformation of loose, dry material as it is acted upon through contact with liquid resin. While The Peach Eater functions as a document of its own creation, other pieces, like Bite, exist only as photographs–composed of transitory elements, the original drawing is lost. Acting as only a partial, and inevitably inadequate, citation of a past event these works elicit memories, which, like the nature of the photographic medium itself, bear only a tenuous relationship to historical actuality. With the passing of time, these remembrances become increasingly distorted and alienated from the initiatory moment, and take on a narrative life of their own, generating a sentimentalized story that can only be "pieced together" by referencing corresponding works of art. Operating in symbiosis, memories and images devise a fantasy of the past, the authenticity of which can never fully be captured.