Graham Caldwell: Emergence
June 1st – August 6th, 2016Exhibitions
Opening reception: June 1st from 6-8pm.
Being in a room filled with Graham Caldwell’s work provokes both desire and fear. The forms are seductive—smooth, or rippling, or broken, or curved—but they are also dangerous—heavy, and sharp, and precarious, and always threatening to shatter. Walking past, one is confronted by their reflection again and again. Yet it is never exact, but curved, or broken, or flipped. Everywhere lurks violence, either physical or metaphysical, behind an alluring exterior. This, of course, is inherent in the material properties of glass, which is never an innocuous medium. From the 2,000 °F temperature at which it is molded to its heavy but breakable final product, working with glass is constantly a risk. Caldwell, who studied glass at the Rhode Island School of Design, uses his facility with and knowledge of the material to create work that examines this instability and exploits its commonplace appearance in our lives, pushing us to look closer at others, and at ourselves.
The fantastical installation Watching Machine (2016) has more in common with real-life surveillance than the cable drama kind. It allows us to peer around corners and see beyond our usual field of vision, but in a random, not schematized, way. As she approaches, a viewer is presented with a surfeit of views of aspects of her environment that may not be helpful or intentional at all—a randomized dragnet of data that prioritizes quantity over quality. In this way, Caldwell places us in the position of a government agency (the National Security Agency springs most readily to mind) with a wealth of information, much of it mundane. Watching Machine presents not a totalizing perspective on one’s neighbors and environment, but a surplus of random and piecemeal views, rendered dangerous if it is assumed to be complete or impartial.
Slumped Iridescent Box (2016) and Untitled (loop lens) (2010) distort the viewer, confronting us each with a topsy-turvy version of our current situation, like an alternate universe with different laws of physics. With simply some changes of light and gravity, this is the version of me that exists visually, and could exist physically. An immediate reference for these works, of course, is how Caldwell expertly manipulates reflective and optical laws that apps mimic digitally. But more interesting is the way that the longer one stands in front of the work, the less amusing and the more sobering the view of one’s self becomes. What I took pains today to present to the world is exposed as containing both Brobdingnagian and Lilliputian errors; as my face blooms into macro- view I am faced with my grotesqueness, and when my reflection shrinks and pinches I confront my own triviality.
In some of Caldwell’s work, the watched subject shifts from humans to the world of materials. In works such as Broken Iridescent Drawing (2015) and Broken Mirror Quadriptych (2016) we can trace biography, confront the scars of the pieces’ past existence. Each unique blow left an index of its contact, a map of violence. The work’s very fragility is dangerous, with the possibility of glass fragments threatening any exposed part of the body tempted to reach out and trace the shattered mirrors. Without seeing the process, we are unable to not visualize it: the potential energy become kinetic energy, the reared arm or object become battering ram.
In a more traditional work such as Bloomburst (2016) Caldwell displays his taming of gravity—its practical use in glass-blowing, and the work’s defiance of it once cooled. It is necessary for the creation of the work, and also its impact. But in Gravity Study (2016), we see not taming but succumbing. Of course the glass here has hardened too, but it is still in gravity’s thrall, hanging in the air, visibly yearning to meet the ground beneath it. This desire has been thwarted by the artist, but it also seems a merciful one, given how the earth was acting on the glass. The long stretch marks frozen in one moment of time are signs of gravity over time, as the molten glass, pulled by its own weight, thinned and strained and threatened to tear. Thus captured, we seem witnesses to an eternally slow violence, a stretching towards destruction.
Our own bodies are undoing this same process from the moment we are born, and although not being liquid they don’t progress as quickly, we all know that the longer we spend on earth, the more insistently our bones, muscle, and skin reach back towards it. Caldwell continually draws our attention to ourselves: our place in our environment, our warped reflections, our bodies’ attraction to the ground. Gravity Study displays the marks of its own making, as, ultimately, do we.
-Kristen Gaylord
About the artist: Graham Caldwell received a BFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998. He has had solo shows at Martos Gallery in New York; G Fine Art, The Millennium Arts Center, and Addison Ripley Fine Art in Washington, DC; Bank in Los Angeles, CA; Luis de Jesus Seminal Projects in San Diego, CA; and Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara, CA. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
About the author: Kristen Gaylord is the Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Photography at MoMA, and a PhD candidate at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. She is interested in modern and contemporary art, the history of photography, and the ethics of artistic practices, and is working on a dissertation titled “‘Infiltrate the masses’: Immaculate Heart College and Corita Kent in the 1960s.”
