Peter Sacks. For the Record

About

In works such as Wake and Fuse, installed in the East gallery, we find luminous color—ocean currents and the green world face us in a poignant celebration of an earth we stand to lose. In Outcome, Sacks dismantles the 10-inch wood-block grids found in previous series to create unpredictable, multicursal borders. Are they broken off from some much larger, once complete, world? Buried within their surfaces, alternately obscured and revealed, is a vast terrain of almost-discernable objects—hand-turned drills and bits, window frames, speedometers and barometers, bits of clothing, charred and carbonized wood, zippers, surgical tools, jewelry, electronic debris, flotsam cast up by tides after storms and other detritus that has been subjected to burning, soaking and oil and acrylic mediums. The viewer is left to parse whether they are discovering artifacts of the past or glimpsing into the ruins of a dystopian future.

In the main gallery, four works entitled Spirit Markers stride across the wall in forms that are both geometrical and sinuous; the irregular compositions and undulating surfaces evoke shamanic warriors, or constellations moving across the night sky. Are they fugitives carrying their last belongings? Are they ancestral messengers bearing gifts?

On the second floor, Sacks introduces a new series of intimately scaled sculptural figures—the Go-Betweens—spiritual powerbrokers, reminding us of Sacks’ South African origins. Alongside these, Retrieval invites closer inspection of its shimmering surface. The metallic “skin” reveals delicate etchings, while a profusion of colors begins to appear amid the silvers, blacks and greys. Human and animal eyes emerge from among bits of text and twisted metal. In No Harvest, a mouth (or is it a tiny credit card holder) gapes, revealing a golden tongue made from a miniature palm tree pendant.

Under the pressures of extreme fire, flooding, drought and bombardment, things left behind or under rubble mutate—their identities lost, their uses abandoned and incomprehensible. Yet Sacks reminds us that sites of wreckage can be sites of transformation, and that those things which are most intimate to us can be lost but never entirely abandoned. The surface of these works is a hard wrought site of retrieval, even of rugged grace.