Jack Hanley Gallery: Colter Jacobsen - Light Falls.

Comment: I wonder how the passage of an object from discarded to 'found,' and then re-contextualized might be analogous to the transformation of an image through memory and medium? What's wonderful about Colter Jacobson's show is how he recognizes the ambiguity of authorship, the power of an image or a wrapper or a sentence, (as in the words from "bill" by Bill Berkson series) to be re-contextualized, and the idea that there is something spiritual and transcendental in the execution of memory. He is both killing the past and paying homage to it while carrying out the movement of mechanical pencil on paper to give the keystone-- the mental image-- a tangible place hovering above and between the source and the final product.

My absolute favorite part of the show is the photograph of a framed photograph of a painting with the flash reflecting off the glass, and the accompanying drawings, divined through Jacobsen's process of drawing the photo and then later, drawing the memory of the drawing of the photo. The starting point of that trek is a photo of a painting of the high seas By Donal Mosher. It's the white light in the middle that makes it magic.

There are three pictures presented in "Light Falls" without alteration. That is, three images that are the first generation article. A page torn from an old book with the printed vignette of a nineteenth century woman sitting and looking away from the lens with her hands folded in her lap. Beneath the image are the words in all capitals, THE AUTHOR. Another is a photograph of a person, I'm assuming Jacobsen, covering his face with a mask made from the torn image of a waterfall pouring into a large body of water. There are two holes for eyes to see through the mask and the waterfall is positioned so it appears to be pouring directly from the center of his forehead. The third image is a found snapshot of a child being thrown high into the air at church.

Gesamtkunstwerk is a German word that translates to 'total work of art.' This show seems like it is one installation trying to be a total work of pictures. Not because every type of image is represented, but because the meditation that creates an image, the keystone of images-- the mental image-- is the ghost in the machine uniting the parts of "Light Falls." There is a waterfall coming out of Colter Jacobsen's forehead, a quasi-spiritual meditation on the potential of recreating an image (the potential simulacrum), as it exists in the artist's mind before becoming form. This is Baudrillard's simulacrum that "is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right." Jacobsen is not simply questioning the originality of images like those of Sherrie Levine or Cindy Sherman; he is creating a shrine for the process of an image's transmutation.

The first thing we see when we walk into Jack Hanley is an assemblage cross, culled from package cardboard, cutouts of icons, arrows, logos, and ads. At its base is a pile of gold and silver plastic wrappers and other collected shiny reflective trash like a mound of treasure. To the right and left of the cross are pairs of lamps that appear to be illuminating a portal into deep space-- a black circle on the wall above each lamp with little white specks for stars. I got wonderfully lost in that space and then glanced down to see a painting of a girl being tossed into the air at church. On the opposite wall was the actual photo with lamps on either side as well. All of this seems to represent a portal of reverence for the space Jacobson goes to draw.

The other theme in "Light Falls" is dualism. The dualism can be seen in "On the Street a Dream (Missing the Mint)," "Looking for an Honest Lamp," and in all of the hand painted and drawn pairs and the thrift store paintings. In "On the Street," neatly arranged silver and gold gum wrappers surround a framed composition of two stickers, one with the black outside peel intact but nothing in its circular center, and the other a circle with no surrounding sticker. It reads as hole and whole. 'There' next to 'missing,' found with lost, or original mundane fact and reclaimed sacred identity. The dialogue discussing the middle point between two states of being throughout the show is an appreciation of the dyad. Not its two parts, but the fact that the linking of the two makes a unit.