Carving space

Jonathan Villeneuve’s “Wavelength” and Kip Jones’ “Linear Gesture,” opening Saturday at Eastern Edge Gallery, challenge the viewer to engage with the gallery space, and their own bodies, in confounding new ways.

Villeneuve’s large scale kinetic sculpture, constructed from poly-form plywood sheets, tubes, and lumber (“The hardware store is my Lego box,” he says), confronts the audience with a roiling, wood-grain mass that gyrates, creaks and bangs with something that suggests not only a turbulent sea, but with the snarling menace of a chained wild animal. The mundane construction materials here have been re-contextualized to provoke a kind of startling wonder in the viewer, despite the plywood and two-by-four’s humble origins, and given the unpolished nature of the piece overall (the work is unpainted, unvarnished, and you can see all the gears and apparatus working), the material speaks for itself. You’re forced, as a viewer, to consider these everyday construction materials in a new way.

Playful and open-ended in conception, the noise emitted by the sculpture is an important component of the work, and reveals Villeneuve’s experimental approach: after plugging the sculpture in, he allows the various mechanics and materials to make their own “music”, a continuous series of squeaks and whirs that act as a soundscape to the sculpture’s wave-like movement. By removing his own hand and intention, Villeneuve allows for chance to operate in his work, letting the piece live on its own terms outside of his own aesthetic judgements and biases, thereby eluding questions of authorship and presenting a work that’s vitality lies in being experienced, not just looked at. This sort of mad scientist approach undermines the notion of the artist as a visionary genius, and highlights Villeneuve’s process oriented art practice contrary to the idea of a precious art object as finished product held up for public consumption.

Similarly, Jones’

“Linear Gesture” draws attention to the viewer’s body as it relates to the sculpture, and the gallery space itself. What appears to be a simple piece of wood dowelling connecting one wall of the gallery to the other is actually an elegantly conceived and rendered modular sculpture which uses magnets, installed inside the wood itself, to hold segments of dowelling hovering in the air. Think Brancusi’s “Endless Column” but made of wood, and on its side.

A drawing in space, as opposed to on paper or canvas, the work suggests an invisible, conceptual line that runs to infinite, with what Jones calls “animators:” small, delicate strips of wood formed into almost web-like curlicues which accentuate how the line dips and moves through the space of the gallery. The play between the static object and the movement of the line creates a tension the viewer feels, more than they actually see, and, as Jones puts it, attempts to capture the illusion of defying gravity, like Yves Klein’s famous photograph “jumping into the void.”

According to Jones, the amount of curve in the line is dependent upon the architecture of the gallery space, so that the piece has much more “movement” the smaller the room is. In this way, “Linear Gesture” changes form with each new exhibition as determined by the actual physical properties of each space in which its shown. As a result, you could say that the piece is constantly changing, and in contrast to the static nature of traditional sculptural objects, cuts the space it inhabits in new ways each time it’s seen.

Eastern Edge Gallery continues to exhibit thought-provoking and challenging contemporary art from across the country and beyond, and this is a show not to be missed. The opening reception (3-5 p.m.) features food, drink and artist talks from Villeneuve and Jones, who’ll go into their respective art practices in more detail.

Craig Francis Power is a visual artist, curator, and writer from St. John’s.