Opening Reception of 'Elemental Form,' a Solo Exhibition featuring Jessica Drenk

They look like agates, banded bullseyes whose whorls take shape over millennia. Or geodes broken open to reveal their crystal-filled interiors. Or then again they resemble sinuous riverbeds seen from aerial perspectives. Jessica Drenk’s junk-mail sculptures, the pieces in Elemental Form, juxtapose slow time—the gait of erosion, counted in eons—with quotidian rhythms measured by the arrival of the mail, the psychic and temporal weightlessness of sales and deals. Ephemera versus eternity.

Building in layers, Drenk renders erosion, sedimentation and crystallization human-made. Arguably, our Anthropocene moment gives meaning to the reversal her labor provokes, an anomaly at a time when humans and the natural world often seem irreparably at odds. But verisimilitude is clearly not Drenk’s goal: not mimesis but transformation.

“The poles of the earth have wandered. The equator has apparently moved,” John McPhee writes in Annals of the Former World, his Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction tome about North American geology. The fixity of latitude and our agreed-upon compass points are not set in stone, it would seem, although we look to them to orient ourselves. Drenk’s new work highlights this ambiguity: fluidity rather than fixity emanates from her pieces.

Meandering through her new work in Elemental Form, bands of color highlight movement in fact, allow us to “follow a thread,” and in so doing underscore this flow—what the artist calls “an aqueous sensibility.”

This ambiguity—this being in “the state of flow”—lies at the heart of Drenk’s practice. Her works are rebellious: what seems—and is—solid is also constantly shapeshifting. And so we wonder. What does it mean to be set in stone? Might a kind of alchemy change how we perceive form or matter or fixity? It is our sense of time that wobbles and with it our understanding of the life cycle of objects through time. Could they mean more than we believe? Could they suggest, in fact, their opposite? Exactly, yes, Drenk seems to say: what if they could?

We all need this right now. It feels elemental, the desire for solidity but also for water, for wetness. Put another way: by harnessing dichotomies, Drenk is able to give us what we need.