Matt Neff & Alisha Wessler. Legerdemain

About

Both artists explore the found object in their work: the collecting, handling, and transformation of discarded or overlooked things by way of an intuitive, human-centered hand. On view through September 1 and organized by Kayla Romberger, the exhibition traces the intersections and divergences of these artists’ autonomous practices through shared themes of labor and precarity; abstraction and figuration; personal narrative and myth. 

The title “legerdemain” refers to the “skillful use of one’s hands when performing conjuring tricks.” Each artist destabilizes the familiar through careful acts of staging or embellishment. Matt Neff’s sculptures strip everyday objects down to their most fundamental essence. Alisha Wessler imbues found and natural materials with layers of labor and narrative potential, leaving room for uncertain taxonomic and folkloric interpretations. Neff’s work is never stable; he recycles and re-incorporates parts of old sculptures into new works, sometimes over periods of years. Wessler describes her methodology as “alchemic”;  Neff, an exercise in “working in real time.” Both artists are interested in obfuscation and in the representation of the invisible. The objects are “are no longer exactly what they are.”

How do we broach the foreign or unfamiliar, a concern now more politically contentious than ever? Matt Neff and Alisha Wessler address uncomfortable territory by taking the strange and making it familiar, or rather, by taking the familiar and making it “familiarly strange”—Freud’s idea of the uncanny—and making it legible again. They seem to tell us that we should not be afraid. Their work beseeches us to address it, to tell its story. Sit down, sit here, it says. All are welcome.