Meantime Co. begins 2023 with Life and Space, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Jennifer Macdonald and Raphael Taylor. Both artists use the loaded physical components, histories, and psychic potentialities of space, on large and small scales, and within real and ethereal realms, to execute sculptural works and spatial interventions.

Like the artists of the Light and Space movement, Macdonald and Taylor investigate and fetishize alternative materials, which are conditioned by the space around them. They make paradoxical works which are simultaneously ethereal and atmospheric, yet equally geometric and analytic. This exhibition explores these paradoxes by experimenting with the pre-existing spatial qualities of the art gallery, which also functions as a law office. It also extends into the urban landscape, where Macdonald has installed several pieces in the adjacent garden.

Handwrought through the centuries-old process of lost-wax casting, Macdonald works spontaneously, allowing materials such as molten and firm waxes, recycled styrofoam, cardboard, and various found objects from her studio to guide the forms. After these assemblages are cast, they are reminiscent of everything from vehicles, dwellings, cartoons and machinery, to archeological remnants found by the people of the future. The unique casts are often hand-worked further, sometimes cut up and collaged into other arrangements, painted, patinated or fastidiously polished. Macdonald relays a spectrum of sensibilities through her work: humor, elegance, playful raunchiness, timelessness, and decay.

In contrast, Taylor’s work fetishizes machine made forms. Interrupting the austere functionality of the spaces in which they are shown, Taylor’s work requires specificity and planning so as to slip in seamlessly with the architecture. For this exhibition, he has modified the existing drop-ceiling of the gallery space, altering it’s prototypical format with the addition of raised and lowered metal surfaces, and making it into the substrate for a spliced and mosaicked image which has been further disassembled by the imperfections of the material it’s printed upon. The installation is complemented by two-dimensional works which also utilize the drop-ceiling tile material as a substrate for digitally-printed depictions of industrial landscapes and workplace interiors, in miniature and in full-sized scale.

The conversation that ensues between Macdonald’s and Taylor’s artwork brings up the psychic effects our professional and living spaces have on us- giving us cues on how to behave, and instilling a sense of security, or unease. The works also give us pause to consider what we our society might be leaving behind; what parts of our present will remain for archeologists of the future to find?

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Jennifer Macdonald (b. Great Barrington, MA), is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She works in sculpture, painting and animation. Her work has been exhibited at Sala Projects, The Drawing Center, Anthology Film Archives, in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, among others. She received an MFA from Hunter College, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, earned a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Certificate in Sculpture from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. An artist’s book Shipwreck, was published in 2022 with Miniature Garden, and a solo exhibition is forthcoming in 2023 at Underdonk in Brooklyn.

Raphael Taylor (b. Washington, DC) lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited at Rumplestiltskin, MuseumofAmericaBooks, Rear Window, Louis B. James Gallery, the Broad Art Center, UCLA, and the Lisbon City Museum (Lisbon), among others. He received an MFA in combined media from Hunter College, and a BA from Oberlin College. With Miniature Garden, he published an artist's book, CS-B Crystalline Sky in 2018. Later this year, he will present a solo exhibition at the Maria Leuff Foundation in upstate New York.