NYAB Event - Jessica Sanders “Ambiguous Warmth”

Jessica Sanders “Ambiguous Warmth”

Kansas

This event has ended.

KANSAS announces Ambiguous Warmth, Jessica Sanders’ first solo exhibition with the gallery. The title of Jessica Sanders’ first solo exhibition at KANSAS - her second in New York, and the gallery’s first in their new Rivington Street location - Ambiguous Warmth, evokes the mutability of beeswax, Sanders’ material of choice, as well as its curious organicism. Beeswax is, by its nature, an alterable material that can easily change states from liquid to solid, and back again, a property that Sanders activates in her work. In the laboratory of her studio Sanders explores the possibilities that result from melting wax down so as to reform it into one of an ever-expanding spectrum of works. In her hands it becomes everything from effervescent fields of beeswax-saturated linen stretched over custom - build painterly supports, to solid curved sculptural forms that lean against the wall.

In the present exhibition Sanders exhibits two of these many series. One of which is the most refined and monumental iteration of a body of work, the Saturations, that has been a cornerstone of her practice for several years now. The other is a new series that takes her concern with materials, like wax, that have a high degree of changeability, and translates it into a different medium - ceramics - the field in which Sanders received her MFA.

The new Saturations expand horizontally to incorporate two forms. Previously works in this series had always had just one discrete form, even if sometimes that form consisted of two pours that, together, filled the entirety of the commercial suiting linen Sanders uses as her support. More recently Sanders had begun to pair together panels with related forms into diptychs. The inclusion of two forms on the same, horizontally - oriented canvas introduces a new kind of dynamic tension into a series that was formerly defined by the sense, suggested by Sanders’s process, of contained spreading within a single form.

These works, a refinement and expansion of what is perhaps the artists’ signature series, are paired with a new body of ceramic works that share a formal vocabulary of organic shape derived from the terms of the process that creates it - in this case slip casting. Sanders began as a ceramicist, and that background is very evident here, where her interest in clay returns in the form of cast porcelain objects that are segments of a single mold, displayed in sets of four. They are all parts of an earlier mold of a previous work from years ago, which Sanders cast in porcelain, then altered. Much like antique sculptural fragments, these works of Sanders’ feel complete despite their self - evidently fractured nature. Displaying these works in sets of four underscores the way t hat they are both complete in themselves, but also relate to a larger unity - that of the original mold.

Together these works in porcelain and on linen draw our attention to the particular vocabulary of organic form that extends specifically from materials, like clay and wax, which change form when subjected to heat. For example, Sanders likes how the clay will shrink in a calculated way, just as she knows how the beeswax will interact with the suiting linen she applies it to. Thus there is, in both the ceramic and wax on linen works, a shared set of material and procedural parameters, which in turn allow for Sanders to push certain aesthetic issues out of the ways that a work will always both confirm and exceed expectations, this being the excitement of a research-based studio practice, where exploration can always yield new rewards, both formal and conceptual.

-Alex Bacon, New York, 2015