About the Author

Ian Kiaer

November 9, 2015 || Gregory Ruppe

Ian Kiaer
TOOTH HOUSE
AND NOW [link]
October 23-November 14, 2015

For Tooth House, Kiaer conceives studio models and dwelling propositions for Frederick Kiesler’s* biomorphic architectural design, Endless House (1958-59). The exhibition, demarcated by four distinct palette shifts of yellow, white, brown and grey, suggests models for future scientific solutions whilst anachronistically embodying the decay of a primitive past. Like Kiesler’s own break from De Still to the surreal, the objects in Tooth House allude to a past life forgotten; crustaceous cement forms culled from holes in the earth, an idea of a monochrome or perhaps stand-in for a formalist painting, and an inflatable that hangs somewhere between aspiration and complete despair.

~ Gregory Ruppe
images courtesy of Kevin Todora and AND NOW

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Jeff Gibbons

March 6, 2015 || Gregory Ruppe

Jeff Gibbons
Auto Relativity Kinetotron
Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas [link]
January 23 – March 10, 2015

Auto Relativity Kinetotron relies on an economy of content to construct visual forms of existential crises. Three damaged plexiglass vitrines stacked to near human height, one containing a clay amorphous ball, confront an undulating projection of snowy mountaintops. A nervous tension connects the two: one never able to find stability, the other unable to fulfill expectation. Another injured vitrine protects the third component in the exhibition: a Chock Full O’ Nuts can filled with dead flies. The recycled food container becomes waste thrice-fold, a carrying vessel for the perished consumers of human fecal matter, a Manzoni stripped of ego.

~ Gregory Ruppe
images courtesy of Goss-Michael Foundation

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Jesse Morgan Barnett

March 3, 2015 || Gregory Ruppe

Jesse Morgan Barnett
Personal Life
Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas [link]
January 23 – March 10, 2015

Barnett adopts the role of early retiree to reflect sentimentally on subjects of personhood. Pets, living arrangements, employment, and parenthood become material for generating sculptural and pictorial hyper-presence, a process of looking backward and inward to make something seemingly lost present again. Xerox photographic depictions of childhood antics, abstracted details from greeting cards sent by relatives no longer living, and re-re-appropriated objects build a visual maze of tragicomic sensibility. Domestic content becomes an agent for introspection, where a young man simultaneously rediscovers himself through the unceasing wonderment of his toddler son and the premonition of a much older self.

~Gregory Ruppe
images courtesy of Goss Michael Foundation

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