Asterisks

form & concept | April 2022

Despite its abbreviated title, the three-person exhibition *** (Asterisks) is humming with language. Words and symbols alternately illuminate and divide: a neon asterisk blinks in a corner, and a wall of flour sacks emblazoned with the phrase “White Fear” blocks a doorway. Medium tangles with message: a soft tapestry reads “Speak, Friend and Enter,” while a fencing sword and sculptures crafted from porcupine quills communicate sharper ideas. New Mexico-based artists Jami Porter Lara, Erin Mickelson and Kate Ruck are speaking – in whispers, shouts, pleas and battle cries – but the meaning behind their words is intentionally maze-like.

“Each piece in this exhibition reveals the structures surrounding it,” says Gallery Director Jordan Eddy. “The artists are literally calling attention to the walls that enclose the show, but also to broader societal structures that seek to define and constrict the significance of their work.” Lara, Mickelson and Ruck maintain artistic practices that are idiosyncratic and interdisciplinary: the exhibition features found objects, textiles, wall drawings, neon signage, and letterpress prints. From many different angles, the show confronts the interlocking paradigms of art space as white space and personhood as fixed or nameable. Harnessing personal and cultural meanings, they usher the peripheral and parenthetical to the foreground. 

Lara says, “I feel like I’m finally in the terrain of what I want art to do, which is to be that layered, that complicated. It’s been a journey.” Her 2021 solo show at Gerald Peters Contemporary, Terms and Conditions, marked an important shift in her artistic practice. Best known for hand-built ceramic vessels depicting plastic bottles, Lara turned to a variety of materials and techniques — embroidery on furniture, neon signage, lithography, dresses sewn from flour sacks — to examine the role of mothering and the domestic sphere in propagating the social behaviors and ideologies that comprise whiteness.

“Terms and Conditions was a major source of inspiration for ***,” Eddy says. “Jami seized the asterisk as this minimal but potent symbol that could either call attention to something or sideline it. Asterisks filled that show, and spilled over into ours.” A neon sign of an asterisk from Lara’s solo show appears in ***, along with two new works by Lara that further explore the currency, weaponry and armor of whiteness.

“Protection as a theme was clearly an immediate connection between all of our practices,” says Mickelson, who experiments with hand-gilded porcupine quills for the first time in this show. Mickelson is a mainstay at form & concept, with three exhibitions under her belt including her 2021 solo display PAST PERFECT FUTURE. “There are literal and indirect ways in which we all grappled with our own visual vocabulary within this artfully unnamed show, but the word we found was defense,” she says.

Ruck, who also regularly exhibits her work at the gallery, presents textiles and a wall sculpture in ***. Drawing inspiration from the connection between the digital and physical worlds, Ruck explores mass cultural media, object memory and the use of virtual tools in real life. “My approach to this show was to address the different thresholds I’ve balanced between,” she says. “And play is an essential component in the construction of our projected self.”

Director Jordan Eddy continues, “This exhibition possesses an essential fluidity of language, a fluidity of meaning. There is structure to these works, but nothing on view is truly fixed, which is a source of strength.”

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