JESSICA SANDERS
“SWELL SWOLLEN”
OCT 16 – NOV 15, 2014
OPENING RECEPTION: THURSDAY, OCT 16, 2014, 6-8 PM
Jessica Sanders, Crumple A58 & Crumple A59 (details), 2014, Beeswax on stretched linen with artist frame
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Johannes Vogt is pleased to announce Swell Swollen, the first solo exhibition by Jessica Sanders. Born in 1985, Sanders is based in Brooklyn, New York and works between the realms of sculpture and painting via in depth procedural investigations. The exhibition is composed of new works from the Crumple series, the artist’s largest to date, alongside two series of wax-based sculptures.
Material considerations provide the conceptual framework and entry point for Sandersʼ work. Trained as a sculptor, she has been using beeswax since 2006. The material has a low melting point while still maintaining its form, allowing the beeswax to exist on the threshold of a state change. Her interest in fluidity is underscored by the ease with which she shifts formats from sculpture to painting and back. In both the floor and the wall works, surface, transparency, and structure remain a primary concern. In the Crumple paintings, the beeswax is applied to the linen while hot, embedding the fabric with wax. The resulting skin is then broken apart in the crumpling process, forming a complex texture and cleft surface. In this series the wax dually acts as the driving force of the composition as well as a lens with which to look past it and into the ground itself. By contrast, Sanderʼs solid wax sculptures are resolutely opaque, and have a smoothness of a settled, viscous liquid. They appear as if in on the border of self destruction; slumped over themselves, or propped against the wall.
Ingrained in Sandersʼ studio practice are tactile experimentation and observation. Materials and process are mined, dissecting and inquiring without a decided end. In the resulting work, a single trait is honed and followed to its most apt endpoint. Evident in her paintings and objects is the exploration of the physical processes governing the materials behavior, creating systems to reveal the singularity within seemingly known matter.
The Wax Curve sculptures are cast without an inner structure. Minute shifts in proportion allow some works to slump and find stability, while others continue to move and shift with time. The Crumple series, functioning as a ballast to the Wax Curves, breaks down the originally built-up surface. This fragmentation produces a field antithetical to the smooth-skinned casts in structure, process, and action. Sandersʼ new series of Wax Edge Wood works are derived directly from the construction of the Crumple series. They are braces cast inadvertently then isolated, the ephemera at the margins of process.
Sanderʼs work has received recent reviews from Modern Painters Magazine, Artslant, Art in America and Blouin Artinfo. She has recently been featured in a two person exhibition at Kansas, New York, and several group exhibitions at Showroom, Brooklyn; FIFI Projects, Sanpedro, Mexico; and Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York. Forthcoming exhibitions include group shows at Berthold Pott, Cologne; Paul Kasmin in residence at Middlemarch, Brussels; and a solo presentation at Neochrome in Turin, Italy.
