Jessica Minckley

The French theorist Luce Irigaray reframes the nature of being as an expansive web, encompassing its own structure as much as everything held within its fluid, multiplying expanse. The first solo exhibition by Los Angeles–based artist Jessica Minckley seems attuned to this idea of an endless proliferation of meaning, rife with unseen connections linking sculptures and collages to memories, ideas, and emotions. She has created a spare and meticulous installation in which objects uncannily appear less fabricated than excavated, like footnotes from a dream or fragments from an imaginary archaeological dig. In one corner, a stack of pink pastry boxes is piled from floor to ceiling, while next to this, fingers extend from the wall—without benefit of a hand—entwined by a rope dangling two chunks of salmon-colored salt. Across the room, tiny blue hearts float across a torn page, and the black shadow of a figure cascades down the wall from the edge of a framed drawing. The veiled quality of Minckley’s symbolism contrasts cool distance with emotional punch; the irregularity of the distance between works adds to this queasy sense of orchestrated disjunction, like the pull of déjà vu. In the very next room, Megan Williams has installed an energetic exhibition of new paintings, rendering the title of Minckley’s show, “Solo Exhibition,” at once tongue-in-cheek and defiant, perhaps pointing to an ironic edge lurking within the quiet sophistication of her emerging visual vocabulary.