Volume 15, Issue 46
Published March 19th, 2008

Ivelisse Jimenez and Lorri Ott Visit The Present

Long ago before the Internet, the AAA would send its members an actual object called a triptych, to guide them through the wilds of America on the family vacation. It was a small spiral-bound contraption consisting of maps printed on cardboard. From one indestructible page to the next a broad pink line delineated the route, hand-drawn by a diligent AAA employee.

In Description Without a Place, currently on view at exit gallery, Ivelisse Jimenez and Lorri Ott do something like that as they make hybrid works that are neither map nor snapshot, painting nor sculpture, but still serve as guides to traveling through the day in a vehicle of skin and bone. Whatever place they may have departed from in their descriptiveness, they are undeniably present in the gallery, like a triptych on the dashboard, conveying a distinct manner of movement through observation and reverie. In the course of a show containing objects that vary from wall-size to not much bigger than a CD, the well-matched pair take turns presenting long and short views of a world in which man-made materials call to mind ordinariness just as sticks and stones, pigment and graphite did in the very recent past. Yet in their work the ascendancy of plastic and mass manufacture isn't necessarily bad news. For both, the net of the nervous system is cast into a warm sea of light and shadow, color-coded with pleasure and pain regardless of molecular details. It's beautiful work, shimmering and tentative on the white gallery walls like a live butterfly collection.

Ivelisse Jimenez was born in Puerto Rico and divides her time between that island and New York, where she has taught at NYU. During the past decade she has exhibited widely, garnering notice in such high-profile journals as Bomb Magazine and Art in America. Her warmly colorful works owe something to a short list of prominent recent and contemporary artists ranging from the fascinating and theatrical formalist doodling of Jonathan Lasker to the elaborately precarious scenarios of plastic sheeting and widgets assembled by Diana Cooper. She also has learned a type of lushly transparent sensuality from one of her mentors, New York artist Shirley Kaneda, whose elegantly seductive paintings find their own itinerary through color and form.

Jimenez "paintings" are mainly a matter of plastic sheeting, mylar, circuitry wire and Velcro, stuck together with any type of tape and sometimes featuring passages of acrylic. Partly pre-planned, partly improvised, each of the four works at exit gallery was adapted to the gallery's dimensions after arriving rolled up in an oversize mailing tube. Thus they resemble, but are not identical to works in earlier shows. In this way they are in flux, like living creatures - at least until they are collected. The largest occupies most of the back wall at the gallery. Titled "Ten con Ten #2 exit," the resemblance to Diana Cooper, whose work was recently massively sampled at MOCA Cleveland, is only skin-deep. Both Cooper and Jimenez learned much from artists of a previous generation like Richard Tuttle and James Hyde, who have freed the functional, informal materials of daily life for their starring role in contemporary artistic process.

But "Ten con Ten #2 exit" is far less frenetic or threateningly obsessive than any installation by Cooper. Delightfully goofy, it flirts with figurative reference in a friendly way without quite stepping back through the limits of abstraction. A tall, elusive, jungle-colored rectangle interrupted by windows or display screens is flanked on one side by a very small abstract painting, placed about two feet away from the main body of layered, colored plastic. This is attached to the rest of the work with two sturdy-looking sections of brown tape and conveys the idea of an aesthetic engine, transmitting energy into the larger mix. Attached directly to the other side of the central shape is a sort of pictorial object reminiscent of a broadcasting dish or a dog. Just above its blue back a wire flings itself in a crooked loop across the remaining available wall space, connecting with a jumble of transparent yellow tape squares. As a reverie about making art, "Ten con Ten #2 exit" is both funny and open-ended, leaving room for any number of fantasies.

While Jimenez's extroverted pieces have a generous, public quality that all but spills off the wall, Lorri Ott's much smaller, lens-like works focus moments of intensely private perception. It's all about how you stand and how you look. In his essay "The Logic of Lingerie," painter James Hyde asks, "Is the viewer the painting constructs more bi-ocular or bipedal?" On balance, Ott's work is probably of the two-footed variety, demanding attention through sheer reticence and the forceful gravity of their small size and sense of exotic detail. The viewer must either walk up to meet them at close quarters or pass by. Constructed on a base of poured resin, her paintings at exit gallery also contain understated autobiographical passages that embed specific life moments. In one work, strands of shredded blue tarpaulin plucked from a barbed wire fence in Brooklyn, New York memorialize an experience, but only in that they remind the viewer (and the artist) that every choice we make ticks as loudly or softly as the next. Each material in an Ott work is a rediscovery of line or texture in a new key, transposing the acts of drawing and making to a vocabulary of contemporary fragments that seems both rich and forlorn. The strands of blue hang with wistful fragileness against a rock-like mass of congealed resin. They emerge from a sleeve of blue-striped canvas, itself enfolded in the resin as if in a coral bed, while in another niche a cat toy hides in an enclosure made of fabric mesh used to protect fruit in shipment. An idea of significance slips from one material to another like water running through the basins of a fountain, stepping away from each moment like a clock lost to time in the act of counting.

Ott quotes a saying of the Canadian minimalist Agnes Martin, famous for her intensely ethereal grid paintings, who once remarked that it was in thinking about the innocence of trees that she first considered the grid - an Eden of which intertwining, fateful branching is the long sequel. At once organic and resolutely artificial, Ott's koan-like works propose a new, rather than a prior innocence, as they stubbornly invent beauty in a harsh time.

Description Without a Place: At Exit, a gallery space, 2688 W. 14th St., 330.321.8161.

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