Idyllwild Arts Academy, Idyllwild, California
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John O'Brien e s s a y
Jennifer
Vanderpool’s art practice is articulated on two intersecting plans
of activity which form a unified investigation into the motives and,
even more specifically, into the motifs of craving. Her assembling of
elaborately devised groups of aggregate sweets into chains, piles, lines,
loops, sequences and geometric patterns, creates a fragrant bracketing
of post minimal and process art work techniques and formal procedures.
At the same time, her shift from the stability of industrial materials
and/or the un-cultured materials of art povera to the multi-hued, identical
modules of consumer goods in the form of candy gives a critical impetus
to the work while retaining a game-like canniness. Are these pungent
little bits of sugar and spice simply meant to be a new component in
the shifting of material indexes that artist can draw upon in their
ceaseless installation vortex, or is the intromission of consumer delicacies
a lateral move intended to draw a parallel between installational proclivities
and unbridled consumer yearnings? The artist’s viewpoint regarding
this ambiguity emerges rather clearly in her video work, which forms
the second part of her overall project. In these filmed loops, simple
rituals are acted out in which desire and self obliteration are brought
into gentle but clear juxtaposition. Repeated cycles of events such
as a woman munching on petite fours (one tiny little corner at a time,
thank you) or someone sitting in a corner and devouring a box of cakes
side by side with someone covering their legs up with sand from the
beach push the game playing into an altered direction. Far from simply
dilly dallying in the candy aisle looking for choice morsels, the viewer
watches as the artist moves the activity of consuming these tidbits
from the funny to the excessive to the perilously obsessive. Many forms
of contemporary art practice have the viewer in the position of someone
being the active agent in a setting that comes to its final fruition
only after the viewer imagines or acts out an outcome. Vanderpool’s
presentational slyness emerges from the way in which the viewer is keyed
to one set of expectations when looking at the dainty and beautiful
array of small modular sculptures only to find those expectations reversed
in the tough playacting of the filmed work. It is hard to say outright
that Vanderpool has judged consumerism and even self annihilating forms
of consumption to be a evil version of spinning dervish. Her work unpacks
the question of where to locate the point at which yearning turns against
its source and becomes something altogether other. She does this with
meticulous lucidity, without an excess of sentiment (neither pitying
or cloying) and, in doing so, hands the matter over to each of us personally
to mull over. The panorama Jennifer concocts is rooted in the interlocking
perils and pleasures that the ever expanding sea of stuff surrounding
us carries along in its stead.
John
O’Brien |