Art You Love With
Jennifer Gelardo’s diagrams of desire
The art we live with, the things that surround us on a daily basis,
that we take home with us, given, found, passed on, sometimes stolen.
Pocketed. Unlike the unlikely instance of a „bower“ in the infamous
opening lines of John Keats‘ Endymion, the arbor introducing Jennifer
Gelardo‘s art practice is hardly a thing of beauty and not at all
meant to last forever.
There is indeed a thin line being crossed between lure and allure,
natural and composite, art and artifice, all of its problems hinging
on the fact that beauty wants confirmation, is subjective.
Gelardo‘s proposition takes from parameters of biological as well
as philosophical and recombines the framework and the language of
this desire that defines what we do with beauty. How we can use it
to attract, to convince - yet never really without forgetting how
easily it might break, that it won‘t last and never holds.
Beauty, then, as Gelardo defines it, constantly moved around,
is endless, a rather empty concept, moldable, sculptural, requiring
constant recombinations, negotiation, displacement, and doubt – and
that is how I read the near obsession with holders, containers, frames,
shapes and forms positive and negative on the imitation lawn, casts,
but also a cast in the other mean of the word – becoming the equivalent,
or a depiction of desire and the “desired space” as Gelardo puts it
into dialogue. Sensuously collaborative and transparent about it,
what Gelardo exhibits is also a collection of collaborations,
with the sense of situatedness, finding one’s place.
While I am pretty sure that Keats needed the unusually pretty word
“bower” to meet the demands the iambic pentameter put on him,
the word may not have occurred to him without its constraint, I would
maintain this breakage of grammar is what is at play/at stake in the
powerful debris on display in Gelardo’s work, the scattered fragments
of a whole new way of saying, one word after the other, connected,
against the rules, by a comma, art, you, love, with.
Robin R. Waart