CREATURES OF SENSE
MATT KLEBERG, MARY LITTLE, RACHEL MICA WEISS
PRIVATE VIEW, SAT. FEBRUARY 4, 11AM - 2PM
OPENING, SAT. FEBRUARY 4, 2PM - 5PM
ON VIEW THROUGH SAT. MARCH 18
CARVALHO PARK announces the opening of Creatures of Sense, bringing together the work of Matt Kleberg, Mary Little, and Rachel Mica Weiss. A private view will be held on Saturday, February 4, from 11AM – 2PM, ahead of the opening from 2PM – 5PM, with all artists in attendance.
An allegory of perception, the works refute notions that visual knowing is absolute. With a physicality as potent as it is softly inviting, this suite of paintings, installation, and fiber works comes into its complex presence by experience and the manner of encounter, underscoring the artists’ devotion to the dynamic physical interplay between viewer and art object. These works cannot be fixed as any one thing – as emphatic as they are ungraspable, columns become curtains, and screens persuade to be known as thresholds.
Keenly attuned to the making of space rather than simply the shaping of form, these devoutly process-driven works embrace, and in turn reveal, the durational process of making. The works vibrate, pulse, undulate, as repetition builds nuance. It has been argued that repetition equates to objectivity, namely as a Minimalist tool, but not here. Each work is governed by an architectural imagination where repetition informs the work’s inherent character. In Kleberg’s striped arches, parallel bands of color jostle for visual primacy while bouncing off one another like dancers in lockstep. Repetition holds together the paradoxes that define Weiss’s woven screens – tautly strung stratums of polyester embroidery thread that build to gauzy volumes, interlacing strength and diaphanous translucence. In Little’s sculptural works, repeated folds and pleats, openings and closures, of the heavy cotton canvas form a quiet performance of light and shadow. In each, a subtle sense that governs the underlying dimensional architecture is very much alive.
MATT KLEBERG
In Rollerland West (Electric Curtain) (2022), Kleberg’s stripes form a single towering, proscenium arch before breaking from their diagrammatic geometry to cascade along one side, rippling with vibrancy. Kleberg reaffirms the work’s status as flat painting while transcending this fact by deft optical maneuvering. Ribbons of pink, magenta, green, and black read graphically from a distance, but Kleberg’s oil stick stripes are satisfyingly and delicately textured, holding us on the surface while entrapping the viewer in the artist’s illusory play of lines. Revealing the work’s sublayers, the textures recall the porous façade of concrete or the surfaces of time-worn tapestries.
Standing in the center of the gallery is Kleberg’s painting Interchange (for Wile E. Coyote) (2022). Its horizontal stripes stretch and radiate outwards, like beams of light in icon paintings. The bands of alternating green and ivory simultaneously work to funnel the viewer’s focus to the central panel – a tunnel vault composed of a succession of stacked half circles. The work protrudes and recedes, and as the painting’s title suggests, it both entrances and positions itself with jest, playfully pointing to the medium’s historical pursuit as illusionistic window. The air of an altarpiece is undoubtedly lent in the work’s tiered, winged construction – the artist’s work overarchingly references Byzantine architecture and its spatial rules. Here, Kleberg’s paintings also take on a human character – protective structure and body in one – and when surrounded by Little’s and Weiss’s fiber works, discourses open on sacred versus domestic histories, on textile’s role in dividing, controlling, and gendering their architectural spaces.
MARY LITTLE
Little, whose formal training is anchored in furniture design, has described her canvas sculptures in correlation to vibrations and tone. Vibration, by definition, relates to the atmosphere of a place, or the association of an object, as communicated to and felt by others. Here a methodical and deliberate process yields emotive possibilities. Through precision and distinct attention to the subtleties of form, proportion, and surface, Little creates a language of quiet magnitudes in spite of the work’s seemingly subtle vocabulary.
Rosemary (2022) extends 80 inches across the gallery wall, holding a steady presence as the eye travels. With its sustained draping weight, it also sways upwards, ribbon-like in its fluidity. May (2022) is a tapestry of undulating shadows. Its flowing asymmetrical form is defined by vertical fields of triangular pattern, interchanging with muted flat expanses. The work’s edges extend forward into the viewer’s space in a performative gesture – their construction harnesses atmosphere onto the work’s surface, making shadow the artist’s second medium. Of a particularly sensitive vision, Florence (2022) is composed of manifold, long parallel pleats that taper then swell. Embodying both drapery and architectural structure, its rhythms are held in an exchange of fullness and tautness. The sculpture visualizes abundance, a central pilar to the artist’s work. Little’s titles carry personal associations, murmuring of time and place, namely of her upbringing among the idyllic hills and expansive grasslands of County Down in Northern Ireland.
RACHEL MICA WEISS
Weiss’s trio of fiber works, scaled to the artist’s body, act as mesmeric apertures. What Weiss weaves is more infinite field than enclosed plane. With their irrepressible luminosity, the works encourage a stepping through, incited by the desire to know what is on the other side, like the correlative to the secret, inner passageways one explores in one’s mind. The artist weaves hundreds of miles of lustrous threads into a single work. When directly confronting these portals, Weiss’s woven planes blend and dissolve into an impalpable color field; when viewed at an angle, the geometries reveal themselves, and the complex, interlacing mathematics of Weiss’s system of threading. Transcending the work’s physical construction, the result underscores the uncertainties of perception, suggesting our senses are stronger guides.
Dark Veil (2023) touches on the emotional or psychological implications of a veil’s use to conceal and conversely expose, informed by French writer and playwright, Hélène Cixous’s text, Savoir, which delves into the relationship between knowing and seeing. Anchored by a dark pool of color that first reads as uniform, the work slowly reveals itself as a dense interplay of many hues – its character crystallizing with sustained focus, as one’s eye might adjust to the contours of a space in the dark. Perforated by a bright band of auburn at its top, the work provides an aperture into yet another space beyond the plane.
Weiss disengages her subject from the interior sphere to the sublimities of the natural world in the other two works featured here. Throughout her practice, Weiss’s color gradations lend physical form to such abstract presences as the immateriality of mist or the weighted volumes of fog. Motherhood has allowed her to study the peculiar, atmospheric tonal shifts of the earliest hours of the morning. Forest Gradient II (2023) considers the forest as a kind of densely layered scene for the senses. Apparitions of pale pink and lavender hover weightlessly under the density of a verdant cloak – emanating, like the glow of first light.
Matt Kleberg (b.1985, Texas) received his BA from the University of Virginia in 2008 and his MFA from Pratt Institute in 2015. His work is in the permanent collections of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; National Gallery of Art, DC; Williams College Museum of Art; AD&A Museum, UC Santa Barbara; Old Jail Art Center; Addison Gallery of American Art; and OZ Art Collection. Recent exhibitions include those with Pazda Butler Gallery (TX); Berggruen Gallery (CA); Sorry We’re Closed (Brussels); Barry Whistler Gallery (TX); Studio Cromie (Italy); Albada Jelgersma Gallery (Amsterdam); Louis Buhl & Co. (Detroit). Kleberg’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Painting is Dead, Artsy, Vice, Maake Magazine, ArtDaily, New American Paintings, Blouin Artinfo, ArtMaze Magazine, Juxtapoz Magazine, Artillery Magazine, and Hyperallergic.
Mary Little (b. 1958, Northern Ireland) lives and works in Los Angeles. She conducted her Masters in Design, with a focus on furniture, from London’s Royal College of Art, which led to a sustained approach to her work as sculpture. In 2015, she made a conscious break and began to create works devoid of functional reference. In 2018, Little exhibited this new direction at Craft Contemporary Museum (formerly CAFAM), Los Angeles, followed by a solo show at Craft in America Center, Los Angeles. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, and Vitra Design Museum in Basel. Her work has been acquired for private collections in Europe and North America, which includes Beth Rudin DeWoody, as well as public collections as the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Little's work has most recently been reviewed in Architectural Digest, Galerie, and Surface magazines. She is a 2019 recipient of the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
Rachel Mica Weiss (b. Maryland, 1986) is a sculptor and installation artist based in New York. Weiss earned a BA in psychology from Oberlin College and an MFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute. Weiss has been the subject of eight solo exhibitions at the following: Here, Pittsburgh, PA (2022–23); Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA (2019); Lux Art Institute, San Diego, CA (2018); LMAK Gallery, New York, NY (2018, 2017); Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA (2015); Fridman Gallery, New York, NY (2014); the San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco, CA (2013). Weiss’ first institutional commission, The Wild Within, is part of deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA. Her largest permanent installation to date, Boundless Topographies, funded by the Gates Foundation, is installed at the University of Washington’s Hans Rosling Center for Population Health in Seattle, WA. Weiss’ work is included in the public collections of the US Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; Microsoft Corporate Collection; Boston Consulting Group Corporate Collection; Media Math Corporate Collection; Sloan Kettering Memorial Cancer Center, Google, as well as the collections of Francis J. Greenberger and Beth Rudin DeWoody.
For press inquiries, contact Jennifer Carvalho at JC@carvalhopark.com