Enveloped

Andre Bradley Boru O'Brien O’Connell Jimena Sarno

Organized by Nicole Kaack

Enveloped. Delays and interruptions are devices of time, moments that exist inside a temporary void. What develops when these suspensions soften and dissolve…and what happens when they do not? Taking as its subject the weight of latent knowledge, Enveloped concerns itself with the substance of the unknown.

Andre Bradley’s paintings and photographs move between privacy and intimacy, familiarity and alienation, developing ideas of interiority through the artist’s conception of himself as a ‘Dark Archive’ — an archive that is inaccessible to others. “No one knows the archival contents of a box from the outside…”

In photography and sculpture, Boru O’Brien O’Connell engages faltering histories as they fall into obscurity and opacity. But I Must Explain… (2017) at first glance appears to be a blank print, a visual void. Yet faint gradations suggest the vague presence of an image that is soon discernible as text. Photographed through a layer of fog, this passage is excerpted from Cicero’s On the Balance of Good and Evil, a document from the original Lorem Ipsum, now better known as a typesetter text.

Jimena Sarno’s Elsewhere (2012) plays on constant deferral, looking toward a place that refuses to arrive because it cannot, limited to existence in language and abstraction. Looping through term completions provided by the Google Search browser, Sarno gestures to a looking that never finds material form.

These delays and interruptions are indicative of an unknown space that exists within the artist themselves, as well between the artist, the work, and the viewer. Precarity and ambiguity are tangled in a hope of revelation that holds us afloat in seemingly infinite territory. May we hang on to the permanence of the unknown and the uncertain, remaining adrift in constant anticipation. Perhaps there is nothing to see, and perhaps there is.