Wading In A Puddle

Elizabeth Jaeger

Eric Veit

Erin Jane Nelson

This show presents works that are imagistic, but never simply so. While the idea of an image is so often cast as a weightless apparition, whether “in the mind’s eye” or in that effusive digital archive of the cloud, these works ply images to objects, or treat objects as images, subjecting them to the heft and friction of physical experience. They bend, however softly, with the laws which govern the bodies that prop up “the eye.” They adopt and adapt materials from the home – textiles, chiefly, rendered as blankets, stretched canvases, and something like a tablecloth, but also the bits of miscellany that give backdrop to daily minutiae, such as an old hat, a found feather that stuck around, a dingy but sturdy bucket. These things have an appearance, but they also accrue touch, over time, in the lilting tides of domestic space. In turn, their tactility insists to us that the eye is no island. You look with your body, too.

In her quilts, Erin Jane Nelson stitches together shreds of photography, fabrics, and other odds and ends from her life as she lives it. They tumble across her surfaces, tracing associations, intuitions, and perceptions, scrambled together with a frenetic, secret logic. In one quilt on view, the composition juts out from its surface with the addition of objects – the hat, a braid, a tag. In another, the quilt dwells on its depths, which are visibly stuffed with drooping heaps of a pungent spice blend. Potpourri, like a memory, lingers and drifts. The more you pay attention, the more its notes seem to shift and unfurl.

In his assemblages, Eric Veit makes an image of objects, staging them for taciturn games of balance. A cork squeezes into its wooden cranny, kept in place only by its own tension. Its side bears a print depicting two swans, necks interlocked – a curious place for ornament, when you consider that a cork spends most of its time inside a bottle or in the trash. Some find different uses. Other inversions in the present work: a basket woven from dental floss, a paper collage emulating the warp and weft of a textile; a bag of chips reversed to resemble grubby silver leaf. And then they’re assembled: inset, offset, counterposed, harmonized in the bounds set by a rectangular edge.

In her present sculpture, Elizabeth Jaeger drapes a dyed-cloth portrait over a 5-gallon bucket. Its subject, idealized but startled, stares straight ahead – which is to say straight at the ceiling – gaping out from some ghostly realm of horizontal being. The face dips with gravity, just slightly, into the void of its container, pulling away from its own piercing gaze. To catch its eye, you have to peer in, crane your neck some. You don’t normally study a tablecloth so intently, but then again, you do spend a lot of time around them. A cloth is like a person: it wants to be seen, to be held, across time.

– Nick Irvin