Earthly Antinomies, Tracey Kessler // 11.12 -12.12 2021

Tracey Kessler moves between media and material, different perceptual routes in which her gestures and those proper to the materials create a third gesture that is the work itself. The third axis, a meeting place, extends to the viewer. Here she incorporates natural materials—flax, wool, straw, wood, clay, leather, and iron—and materials that time has made almost second-nature— rope, wire, and chain metal. Questions about what is natural, how nature AND work on materials, and the place of humans and their creative touch are present in these gestures of materiality. They turn us back toward the ground of our being amid climate change and the pandemic.

The paintings (Understanding Elsewhere, Zygote Edition, Navigating Mixed Terrain) often blend oil paints with natural pigments (oak galls, sumi ink, copper, onions skins, eucalyptus, various other plant forms mixed with iron oxide). Acrylics, thick gesso, charcoal, ink, graphite, colored pencil and encaustics form outlines. She experiments with how they interact, how they contrast.

Nature's presence: leaving pieces outside in the rain; sun fading; salt-wind pushing over and wearing; letting time and weather go by and the materials to decompose and evolve with the imprint of their passage. For Electric Intent, she gathered roots, painted them with aluminum pigment, spray paint, and enamel and left them outside for 10 years before wiring them with the electrical mechanics of a kiln—another experiment in action and reaction.

Before focusing on painting, ceramics, fiber art, and sculpture, Kessler was an interior designer. The structure of designing and building, the actions of programming, concept development, schematic design, building, shaping, and making carry through to her art. But while she sets up parameters, her abstract painting sheds time or consciously takes up a different rhythm.

In a recent article about his exhibition of photographs of the Amazon, Sebastião Salgado said, “If the human lifespan were a Millenium, we’d understand very well our problems, our planet, we’d be adapting to another way of life on the planet. But we have no time, you see?” To the Greeks, the gods lived in a sphere that was outside of mortal, cyclical temporality. The way to enter it was through action, praxis, which like the Milky Way cuts a straight line through the cosmos. Kessler's recent work explores our earthly condition—the cycles and circles of action, reaction, coaction, and interaction—to cut through the dualities of our nature, our double-binds.

The show's central installation, Earthly Antinomies, features a cluster of flattened ceramic pieces tethered by strips of leather. Like mirrors on a wall that give us eclipsed reflections, their shapes take on forms that shift as you look at one and then another, and the spaces in between them. Cutting boards, animal organs, archaic talismans, and reliquaries also come to mind. We think too of surfaces—treated, glazed, tanned, industrialized—that we live with bodily and visually. As elements in flux in daily life, we relate to them in ways that vary with our understanding.

Antinomy is defined as a contradiction. But the root is anti-nomos: against or anti-law. Kessler breaks with Aristotelian logic, with its laws of identity and the excluded middle. For Kant, an antinomy was a category of conjoined ideas—God and freedom; space and time; atomism, spontaneity and causal determination. If we tried to apply the reason of empirical experience to it, we'd get a contradiction, a double-bind. Reason cannot reach the transcendent, Kant argued. Antinomies like earth and nature or human and non-human are our lives' defining spirits. We are the in-between, grains glistening in the furrow. Tomorrow's harvest. I’ll bring it to you.