BIRTHMARKS
Kristen Sanders / David Sprecher
09.06-09.20.2024
Opening Reception | Friday, September 6
6-9pm
Birthmarks features recent work by the St. Paul-based painter Kristen Sanders and the Chicago-based sculptor David Sprecher. Both Sanders and Sprecher explore mark-making as the negotiation between a living being and its environment. By calling attention to the traces of these negotiations— toothmarks and empty shells, second skins and used packaging—the artists demonstrate that existence is always a question of co-existence. Together, their works carve out a space somewhere between creation myth and science fiction. Playfully tactile, yet intangible.
In Sanders’s paintings, images of hominid skulls, prehistoric carvings, stone tools, sea shells, and medical mannequins reference different temporalities, including the evolution of the species, the development of technology, the cycle of the tides, and the inevitable trajectory from birth to death. Her surreal compositions and atmospheric palette of moonlit blues, sunset pinks, baked clay, and blood red give her paintings the quality of allegory, suggesting a meaning just out of reach. She considers her practice to be an exploration of the binaries between mind and body, human and animal, self and object, and life and death.
Sprecher’s installation combines molded styrofoam packaging from televisions and other electronic media with enrichment toys gnawed and pawed by the big cats and bears of the St. Louis Zoo. Designed to keep animals entertained in captivity, enrichment toys do not mimic natural objects. Their abstract geometries and bright colors rather suggest modernist sculpture, undermining the boundary between nature and culture. By deforming these toys with tooth and claw, the animal becomes a kind of artist or author, and the toy becomes a record of their daily life. The styrofoam packaging highlights the zoo’s role as an institution not only of entertainment and education, but of care and preservation. At the same time, the objects hint at the processes of enclosure, extraction, and waste that are reshaping the planet.
Both artists link various forms of mark-making together into chains of association and translation. Sanders relates her own paint strokes with “finger fluting”—grooves made by hand in the soft walls of prehistoric caves—or the ridges formed by a mollusk’s mantle. Sprecher translates his enrichment toys through 3D scanning, casting, and finishing into uncanny sculptural copies. Such transformations can be acts of preservation and erasure at the same time. In Sprecher’s words, Birthmarks mixes “impressions of things that are already gone with things that are imminently disappearing and things that are enduringly present.” A birthmark, after all, changes as we change. It is the shadow of time’s arrow, the intimacy of entropy.
David Sprecher is an artist and writer based in Chicago. His exhibitions are ghostly object poems that blend language and things, found and invented forms, presence and absence, to attune to the spirit in things often overlooked. He teaches sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Academy for the Arts and integrates art education into public primary schools through The Chicago Arts Partnership in Education. Recent exhibitions include Organs of Little Importance at Kobo Chika Gallery, Tokyo; Roaming Stone for the 2022 4Ground Sculpture Biennial, Minneapolis; and Social, a two person exhibition with Justine Chance at Apparatus Projects in Chicago. He's published writing in the Brooklyn Rail, Columbia Journal and Chicago Artist Writers and is a cofounder of the design collective ESSAY. @piggys_palace @essay.objects
Kristen Sanders is a St. Paul-based artist whose paintings explore binary ontologies between mind and body, self and object, and life and death. Choosing subjects such as prehistoric carvings, stone tools, and medical mannequins, Sanders’ work charts the boundaries of human consciousness, finding traces of self and intention in the marks, tools, remnants, and images we have left behind.
Sanders received a BA from the University of California, Davis, and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Recent solo exhibitions include Tide/Pool at Dreamsong, Minneapolis, and Protoself at Asya Geisberg, New York. Her paintings have recently been included in group exhibitions at Richard Heller, Los Angeles, The Hole, New York, Anthony Gallery, Chicago, and Good Mother, Los Angeles. Residencies include Moosey, Norwich, UK, The Maple Terrace, Brooklyn, NY, and Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT. Sanders has received press in BOMB Magazine, ARTNews, and New American Paintings. She currently teaches in the Art Department at the University of Minnesota. @kristen___sanders