Photo via Saint Kate Arts Hotel
It was an odd experience; parking easily on the street in front of Saint Kate—The Arts Hotel and walking breezily inside the sparsely occupied lobby that I’d come to know as a most ebullient intersection of social and cultural energy. Muscle memory combined with pandemic fatigue, and perhaps a dash of my own willful amnesia, had led me to forget how much things have changed over the past 12 months. Thankfully, beyond the forced quiet of the entryway, the mezzanine galleries shone light on work by Rafael Salas and Jill Sebastian that revived my eyes, striking me with a like-riding-a-bike feeling of reengaged normalcy.
Jill Sebastian’s exhibition “Preoccupations” in particular couldn’t be a more appropriate visual and conceptual encapsulation of our conflicted moment. One work in the piece, Take a Walk, symbolically evokes thoughts of both emancipation and restriction. Her seven individual photographs of manhole covers on the south wall of the gallery emerge from a conceptual program rooted in observing the ground under feet during her dérives through the city. In their precise and serial presentation though, they suggest a clear and proscribed set of compositional rigors that belie the aleatory nature of their genesis. They indicate a ravenous taxonomical instinct, and their variety-within-a-theme only hints at the odometer reading that must lie under her hood. Sebastian finishes the prints with upfolded slashes that add a disorienting layer of visual interference. The texture takes the work from the 3-D world, into the 2-D, and finally back to 3-D, piling up layers of meaning between its sites of origin and reception. That final layer reminds the viewer of the artist’s presence, which functions in this case like a patina or residue of distress in the same way oxidation does on the metal and asphalt of the streets themselves.
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Meanwhile on the near wall, two sculptures make use of the actual patina of oxidized metal. The markings on the surface of both works, Riddle II, a sagging wall-based shelf, and Sieve, a folded box-like structure on a pedestal, develop with the assistance of the naturally corrosive interaction of salt, water, and copper. The 38 years of elapsed time between their creation, along with their material transformation, speaks to the inevitability of physical change and the natural human tendency to define, control, and resist it.
The north wall of the gallery features a grid of 12 prints of painted arrows captured in situ on street surfaces awaiting public works projects. The found compositions, titled Arrows appropriately, employ the same conceit as the manhole covers with a slightly different visual vocabulary. Their captured diagrammatic marks take the mundane act of infrastructure and city planning and sweep it improbably into the realm of visual examination, even formal beauty. They have a little of Hilla and Berndt Becher’s accidental handsomeness. Like the manhole covers, too, they draw metaphorical depth through the implication of time through material transformation and physical movement.
Sebastian’s show provides a lot to think about in a relatively modest-sized space: infrastructure, pavement botany, time, space, and formal composition. This seems fitting though, because spinning a complex story from a relatively discrete, mundane thing is the one of her most compelling preoccupations. The conceptual space radiating suggestively from her seemingly pedestrian subject matter is vast, and perhaps even more profound given our current physical and psychic constraints.
