Carrie Cook, Kady Grant, Amanda Martinez, Jonathan Pinn, carrie R
Curated by Lauren Fejarang
At Below Grand, New York
August 27 — September 30, 2021
A wrinkle in a bed sheet might measure up to the same amount of time it takes to walk the stairs alongside the exterior of the contemporary building at LACMA. It’s the space of the in-between, the place that only exists because it’s related to other places and objects but doesn’t have a position of its own. You don’t start there, and you don’t end there, but you are there for moments in time. It’s a place where there’s a shift in perception, a place where we’re caught in a flurry.
Jonathan Pinn’s painting “By” lives in-between where ephemera and architecture collide. A dark shadowy band of grey seems to define an edge, an extension of a two-dimensional outer boundary, but one that dissolves with the rest of his traces on canvas. Swirling quick and clinging onto the air, his marks hover, as if Byredo Baudelaire was sprayed at the once chic Barney’s creating space.
Amanda Martinez’s practice orbits around carved repetitions of undulating beats, a place to be in the presence of phonons in optical mode. In her piece “Ear to the Ground (T. Lucida)”, a wavelike cadence unfolds and slips onto the surface of the floor, extending a strophic form. Weaving in and out, Martinez’s work pings the mediate space of a heartbeat.
carrie R’s work exerts candor from the kitchen or the garden in lieu of mid work, finding comfort in her objects apprehending one another. “fountain” sits on a pedestal with four limbs curled up and downward towards a wilted flower like orifice, as if it’s in-between is searching to find it’s space within itself.
Kady Grant visits the notion of body as objectness and vice versa. A kind of interobjectivity, perhaps as Morton might view it, in “Ancient Water” and “Loop”, both, images of objects playing a note on the other. What could be the tune of snake scales on a belly sound like or an eyelash brushing along a ceramic teapot?
Similarly, Carrie Cook’s piece “Soft is Hard” depicts a meaty hand, clinging onto a shell, piercing into a belly button or flesh like orifice. As she blurs the periphery of all surfaces from their beginning to their end, we witness color as they relate to each other.