VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

Devin Borden Gallery presents two exhibitions - Ted Kincaid: Every Doubt That Holds You Here & Jillian Conrad: Splits, both on view  December 3, 2011 through February 7, 2012. The public is invited to a Holiday Party and artists' reception December 3 (Saturday) from 2:00 to 5:00 pm.

Ted Kincaid
Every Doubt That Holds You Here

Ted Kincaid’s images are beautiful, dreamy, ethereal. It’s not necessary to know anything about the work to be transported by them. Some have a hazy, Romantic quality, others a crystalline clarity, still others feel antique; all of them insinuate familiarity. Even if we can’t identify the exact location for each scene, we feel that we’ve seen it somewhere–perhaps in mid-century nature photography or in an old movie. We recognize these places; of this we can be sure.

Ted Kincaid is perfectly happy to leave us with the illusion that we’re witnessing a faithful representation of the real, because his real pleasure lies in convincingly presenting a counterfeit. For these images are by no means what they appear to be: photographic depictions of the land, sea, or moon. They are carefully constructed amalgamations from very un-Romantic sources–including images of stains from his studio floor.

The artist describes himself and his approach to art making as “Machiavellian”. Kincaid intentionally fools his audience; his works, however, compel us to question the veracity of a photographic image in a manner more playful than devious. What looks for all the world like the moon is, in fact, snippets of value and tone culled from numerous sources and painstakingly stitched together digitally, pixel by pixel. The work is delicately composed, having more in common with modeling in painting and drawing than with photography. His pictures of sailing ships and the roiling sea echo the nature photography of John Muir. They also reference 19th century landscape painting, thus transforming works that are pure products of the digital age into vehicles transporting us to lost worlds of artistic practice.

As Kincaid’s art has progressed over the years, it increasingly references a domain of experience that entranced him as a child: the sort of documentation of paranormal subject matter (ghosts, Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, UFO’s) that was popular on American television during the 1970s. These programs, presenting “indisputable” evidence of the existence of these creatures, typically involved some blurry element or other crudely integrated within an identifiable setting, be it an abandoned, “haunted” house, a dense forest, a quiet Scottish loch, or a deserted landscape where an alien ship has landed.

Ted Kincaid’s fascination with such subject matter, his obsession with the lowbrow metaphysical, was as common at that time as the cultural presence of Armageddon and the Rapture are today. Unlike his occultist forebears, however, Kincaid invites us to admire the way his “tricks” bring the otherworldly into being through snatches of the everyday.

Jillian Conrad
Splits

When creating her sculptures,structures, and installations Jillian Conrad’s concerns are consistently formal, something like a laudation for the object in its very objectness. Employing a variety of media–wood, Plexiglas, rocks, sheets of foam, carpet remnants–Conrad thoughtfully explores the emotional impact that lies within her motif – be it an object, landscape, or still life — often translating these subjects into objects that are clearly referential while, at the same time, reduced to the barest line.Despite its having been reduced to a dull black silhouette upon a sheet of thick foam, for instance, the sublimity of a distant mountain range shines through its crude construction.

Taking in Jillian Conrad’s visions, we experience them viscerally, not merely visually. Many deceptively crude-seeming installations have been carefully constructed first as a three dimensional object that is then translated into a two dimensional image. Such transformation is a subject that lies at the heart of her formalist project, one that toys with the boundaries of where a sculpture ends and a picture begins. One construction, entitled Power Projection, consists of a neatly carpentered wooden box with a pile of rocks set on a shelf within. Utilizing an opaque projector focused on the rock pile, Conrad casts a projected image upon a vertical surface within the structure. The viewer is thus presented with a work in which the real rocks have been turned into an image, while the quavering light (the stuff of images) that plays upon them somehow brings these lifeless things to life.

In the most recent of her works displayed in the gallery, Jillian Conrad pushes the idea of illuminating and transforming the object into an image even further, as she explores the properties of fabric. Though flowing fabric is certainly an unconventional medium for sculpture, its surface qualities, fiber composition, texture, and emotive tonalities serve the artist’s ends here quite well. By affixing a torn swatch of wool–a material composed of a sturdy weave–to a slide that is subsequently projected, we are again invited to consider the objectness of the image before us: the tiny hair-like strands that slightly flutter from the projector’s fan. By bestowing a lightness of being and ephemeral quality on something tactile and solid, Jillian Conrad asks us to marvel at what we are accustomed to take for granted. Her works keep viewers in suspense as they function simultaneously as painting, drawing, and sculpture. Jillian Conrad explores these boundaries, while at the same time exploring the boundaries of the ordinary things around us. This is territory we can’t help but be familiar with, but suddenly, thanks to the artist’s direction, it acquires new interest and meaning.

Jillian Conrad is a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant Award. This grant is funded by the city of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.

Pictured above: Ted Kincaid "Lunar 501."