James Carl
"James Carl" by Pamela Meredith, Summer 2009, p. 103
Sometimes an exhibition is so surprising, challenging and ambitious that it inspires wonder and open-ended reflection followed by a most mundane question: “How did he do it?”
This applies to James Carl’s show “jalousie.” Carl’s practice as a sculptor has developed logically and intelligently, but not unpredictably. It is an exploration of the “thingliness of things”—the Heideggerian concept of getting at the essence of objects, probing what makes them what they are. Following this line of inquiry, Carl has engaged with workaday forms as small as a takeout food container and as large as an ATM, streamlining shapes and shifting materials to focus attention on the items’ elemental components. Their transformation from Styrofoam to marble, or from metal to cardboard, for example, while instigating myriad narratives about consumption, permanence, progress and value, also freed them from their assumed inveterate status, making them strange and new.
Strange and new might be considered the starting point for the work in this exhibition, as explicit representation has given way to sculptural objects that defy naming. The works, which consist of woven skins surrounding hollow interiors, are monumental in scale but simultaneously light and airy. The interplay of vacancy and volume, metaphorically relevant to Carl’s previous work in terms of the question of content and its measure, now becomes literal, and the conversation changes to space, structure and tangibility. These aremodernist tropes, and certainly the anthropomorphic forms in the show bring to mind torsos by Henry Moore and Jean Arp as well as works by Naum Gabo, Richard Deacon and even Constantin Brancusi. The specificity of Carl’s materials, his use of colour and the weaving process he has employed, however, combine to keep the comparisons relevant and enlightening, but at a proper distance.
Inspired initially by the construction of a simple bamboo basket, Carl researched the art of weaving, in particular the technicalities of the three-axis weave mode, which is stronger and more flexible than the standard two-way method. This style was advocated by Buckminster Fuller, whose boyhood experience in Maine weaving fishing nets contributed to a life’s work studying tensegrity—his concept of “the integrity of structures as being based in a synergy between balanced tension and compression components” (the artist Kenneth Snelson calls weaving “the mother of tensegrity”). Carl took this collective knowledge on board as he approached the task of weaving a material no less forgiving than metal venetian blinds.
On first viewing, the works’ offbeat shapes and whimsical colours were fascinating and made the forms seem animated, fishlike. The material itself scarcely made an impact. But Carl’s choices in this regard have always yielded a host of nuanced connotations (literary, art-historical, philosophical) and venetian blinds, in their capacity to both reveal and conceal, are well suited to their task here, that of creating a volume of space without hiding it. The artist weaves these connections into “jalousie” as carefully as he weaves the blinds themselves.
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