Jennifer Krauss: Homing In
While both male and female artists deal with home and family life, it’s no surprise that women artists more often depict the home as a troubling, intimidating, or entrapping place. Jennifer Krauss, in her six sculptures at Wood Street, presents ordinary household objects in a way that suggests fears, threats, even traumas. One untitled work is an armchair upholstered in a floral fabric with a skirt about ten feet long. (Krauss built a wooden platform for the chair that’s concealed by the skirt.) The chair itself is not especially big; that fact, combined with the floral covering, suggests a grandmother–and the chair did once belong to Krauss’s grandmother. While a large elevated chair might suggest a throne, this one is both a bit scary and a bit ridiculous. It represents at once childhood fears of the omnipotent adult and a mocking of those fears, given its modest size and bourgeois covering. Yet the fabric itself is a sickly yellow; Krauss called it a “strange, acidy color” and told me that she “liked it because it sort of said ‘mother’ but with a twist–it was inviting and repelling at the same time.”
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Another chair piece, Pair, also both invites and rebuffs. Krauss started, once again, with furniture from her grandmother, two identical wood-framed chairs with upholstered seats. After stripping them, Krauss “thought the frames were so graceful and beautiful, I made the decision not to reupholster them but to use the frames as they were.” She sliced one into pieces and glued and nailed it to the other, so that Pair looks a bit like a double exposure of the same chair: the cushionless seat of one is divided by the seat of the other, which makes the chair uninviting, perhaps impossible to sit on. Pair creates a kind of push-pull effect, its curves inviting sitting though its construction denies that possibility. And because a chair is a kind of mirror of the human body–Krauss notes that we use similar terms, like “arm” and “back,” for chair and body parts–Pair also suggests a person whose double identity or divided self is as disturbing as this awkward chair.
Self-Portrait, the work I found most moving, is also the clearest expression of this artist’s ethos. A small brown maple seed sits in the upper left corner of a sheet of ruled paper, the blue lines painted in carefully, delicately; at the lower right corner is a lone fingerprint. The variations in hue and luminosity of the blue lines and white paper once again suggest that the smallest details are worthy of attention. And this work, together with Carrelli’s others, hints at a narrative: the story of a leaf and seed collector who offers his gatherings on a bedsheet, with its suggestions of intimacy, or on lined paper, suggesting language. The maple seed isn’t mounted or labeled; it’s simply lain near a corner of a sheet of paper, a humble offering, just as the lone sign of human identity is a single thumbprint. Carrelli is clearly an artist who feels that one needn’t collect many leaves and seeds to be fulfilled, any more than one needs to paint all of oneself for a self-portrait; both identity and transcendence can be found in a single leaf or seed.
