Gabrielle Ferrer: 'Transparent Things'
Gabrielle Ferrer, Cones (#28), 2013, archival inkjet print mounted on plywood, 8 × 8”.
Gabrielle Ferrer’s solo debut, “Transparent Things,” combines three distinct bodies of work interleaved in snaky digressions around the upstairs gallery. Framed pages torn from an exhibition catalogue depicting Navajo weavings—from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 1972 show “The Navajo Blanket”—are hung in grids on three of the gallery’s four walls and anchor the exhibition. The artist has applied watercolor over the black-and-white reproductions, partly following the schematic description for each weaving, and a chart listing colors along warp and weft, found in the catalogue. Positioned around these grids are fuzzy pictures of prop closets tinted into states of pastel remoteness and hot, medium-format photos of pyrometric cones (used to time firing in kilns) in which the creamy beige of the disposable measuring instruments sets off backdrops painted in crisp tones from slate to tangerine. The cones’ tips, which are designed to droop to indicate degrees of doneness, are arrested in mid-melt. Frozen in a kind of glass-dripping physicality, they revel at times in the illusion of softness, like an accidental Bernini.
A hovering indeterminacy runs through the works: The blankets’ original colors are abstracted into language and then reinstated; the props diffuse into a middle distance (a photo of pale jugs strongly recalls Morandi); and the cones inexplicably litter brightly lit, unearthly landscapes. The title of the show is taken from a novella by Vladimir Nabokov, in which a ghostly narrator meditates on “objects . . . inert in themselves but much used by careless life.” With its attention devoted to the fine permutations of textiles and primitive forms, the show might have been called “still lifes.” And much like opalescent fruits rendered in oils, the objects are not really still, but rather stirred by the implications of their past and are animated by the optical vibration of their present.
