Fawn Krieger
State of Matter
January 10 – February 14, 2021
Fawn Krieger has found us a way out of the 20th Century.
In 2017, after the US presidential inauguration, she began pressing fired clay into wet cement. With this series, Experiments in Resistance, Krieger has articulated a vocabulary of haptic pressure and provided a record of tactile impression and corporeal event. At a time of social tremor, Krieger has made of herself and her materials a living seismograph, to record the force and duration of these slips in our fault plane.
In Krieger’s work, the event is eternal. What we see are ossified moments of material refusal, surrender, displacement, impression, transgression, and transmission. She calls her sculptures object theatres and hers is a radically condensed performance. The infinite variations and iterations of human conflict are distilled into the action of one body on another. The triumph and trauma of human endeavor is somehow rendered in the collision of these two material bodies. The concern is with relation itself. She is elucidating, with her experiments, an elemental dynamics of contact. The traits and tendencies articulated in these sculptures are both familial and tectonic, historical and molecular.
Krieger has described this series as the inverse of Einstein’s Gedankenexperiment - thought experiment - where instead of playing out the theory in one’s head to figure out physical problems, the theory is played out physically to figure out metaphysical problems. Her sculptures are not only a record of the events of relation, they set out a method of inquiry, a way of coming to know.
The colors of the series call up what became of Einstein’s revelations. They are the colors of the Atomic-Era, of the frenzied assertion that our future had become only brighter, once it held our inevitable, self-inflicted, annihilation. The colors describe an aesthetics of dissonance, and this chord that they strike, sounds a splitting, a cognitive schism. Taking them out of their historical circumstance, Krieger introduces them into her investigation of material contact. In her embodied universe, all consequences are evident, undeniable. Confrontation appears here, as a means of recognition, of reintegration.
With her recourse to the material, Krieger has found a way out of our locked groove of discovery and ruin, progress and annihilation. She thinks of the material collisions in her work, in terms of gravitational singularity. Her sculptures are made up of two geological substances, particles that may not have touched since they were first formed, when they were bound and then severed through extreme pressure at the beginning of time. The event we are seeing is the moment when they find one another again, and negotiate a process of reunification. The pressure and resistance, the confrontation and displacement, the rupture and trauma, are all a part of coming together again.
Fawn Krieger has found redemption in materialism. In her radical attention to what is, she has discovered a universal tendency. Every atom, human body, planet, and star is an instance of the reunification of particles, split apart and thrown into diaspora in the moment of their birth.
All matter is reunion.
Written by Jenny Nichols, Co-Director, Soloway
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Fawn Krieger is a NY-based artist, whose multi-genre works examine themes of touch, event, and transmission. Her work has been exhibited at The Kitchen, Art in General, Nice & Fit Gallery, The Moore Space, Von Lintel Gallery, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Human Resources, Fleisher Ollman Gallery, Real Art Ways, and Neon>fdv. She received her BFA from Parsons School of Design, and her MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Krieger is a 2019 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award Fellow.