Mel Kendrick’s new sculptures introduce a number of elements alien to contemporary sensibilities: on one hand, the pedestal; on another, direct hand-carving; and in a third instance, surface. drawing and marking, with all their connotations of pictorialism. These elements, however, are not employed for their nostalgic intimations, but as artistic means among other means, as devices that have been devalued, at this point in late-20th-century culture, to the level of the functional services they perform. Instead, these works tread significant and relatively unexplored terrain in the role they accord to the spectator.
The sculptures are mostly small wooden works made of pranks that have been sketched and sawed into irregular patterns. Glue and wooden dowels secure separate lengths, making angular, multifaceted structures which appear to twist and turn in different directions, and which require that the viewer walk around them to apprehend their total shapes. The pedestals themselves are no-nonsense, linear, metal structures which position the pieces at eye level, permitting the viewer to observe the diversity of surface and interior incident and the plays on repeating and opposing forms. For the wood has been worked with jagged sawtooth sequences and looping fluid curves, with interior ladder-like formations and space-admitting holes. These forms play contrapuntally over the sculptures, leading the viewer on through the rhythm of their articulation, as angular and fluid elements alternate, repeat, invert themselves, or are echoed in analogous forms. Superposed drawn lines supplement the initial sketching, along with variegated painted shapes. Multiple plays are, again, implicit, as drawn and incised lines (the mark of sawing) often read equivocally, and as the painted marks may read as illusionistic wooden knots or as imposed forms. The result is that these structures, with their quirky, shifting configurations and surfeit of visual forms, seem impossible to grasp as a whole.
This fugitive quality, which eludes precise definition, has parallels in the appeals made to the viewing imagination. For these works evoke a variety of allusions, both independently (as separate structures) and within the individual configurations. They appear totemic, biomorphic, and anthropomorphic at odds; one may appear like a head—a portrait—but then shifts with its references to structural stairs. And a parallel effect is secured in the range of historical allusions, as Cubism, Futurism, and primitivism are alternately invoked, along with welded, constructed works. The result is that these sculptures both affirm and defeat their materiality: they point toward the viewing experience as more than “purely visual,” just as they point toward the viewer as the producer of the referent. In the way they engage contemporary critical issues, these allusive, elusive and formally stunning works have a central sculptural power.
—Kate Linker
