9 February 2024: Dallas’ ten-year SITE131 opens Spring season on Wednesday, April 3, 2024, with Construction Site: 3 in 3D, showing through Saturday, June 8, 2024. The high-powered sculpture exhibition featuring three (3) North Texas artists: Alicia Eggert, Jeffrey Lee, and Kasey Short runs concurrently at 131 Payne Street with the highly popular and anticipated Dallas Art Fair. Curated by guest curator John Pomara, artist and long-term professor at The University of Texas at Dallas, he invited artists, mostly new to the Texas community, to expand their presence in size, position, and materials.
Construction Site: 3 in 3D
Construction: the act or result of construing, interpreting, or explaining.
Site: the place, scene, or point of an occurrence or event; to place on a site or in position.
Why do we construct things to mark and delineate our physical existence? And what do we experience when we encounter that spatial construct called sculpture? Furthermore, what role does sculpture play in the Anthropocene—our distinct geological age in which human activities (mark-making) have impacted our planet so dramatically?
Perhaps more helpful than the why and the what is how contemporary artists interact in 3D in our shared worldly space and how their works alter our sensory experiences of that environment.
This exhibition focuses on three artists whose individual practices result from and respond to our rapidly changing natural, cultural, and even post-planetary (galactic) space. A space that is being shaped by immersive digital technologies that alter our previous conceptions of relations, communication, distance, perception, and perspective. Whether seen through the filter of the Internet, social media, artificial intelligence, the Hubble telescope, or a Space X rocket, ours is a moment of phenomenally swift spatial shifts that require exceptional adaptive capabilities.
Yet, the works experienced in situ here awaken the very human qualities we hope to maintain in the 21st-century and beyond—our capacity to dream, play, discover, feel, create, connect. Whether freestanding, inflated, wall-mounted, performative, or installed, each engages in a delicate balancing act between virtual technologies and our fundamental need for the physical world and human touch.
Jeffrey Lee / Poor Things
As the digital age connects us in new ways, it’s important we head off a “crisis of touch.”2 Interdisciplinary artist Jeffrey Lee does precisely that. Originally trained in fashion and design at the Parsons School of Design in New York, Lee transports his knowledge of garment construction (couture clothing has an
engineered, almost architectural substructure) and his understanding of how fabric moves through space into the realm of art. His freestanding sculptures made of cast concrete, metal hangers, plastic clothing bags, and the chromed racks used in fashion merchandizing, dynamically operate at the intersection of art, fashion, architecture, and design.
His initial quickhanded sketches have the liveliness of fashion illustrations, but the physical works come together in a slow, methodical, additive, collage-like manner: Lee hand-casts forms individually and builds them together, or casts them around and in-between the metal framework holding them together, moving continuously, adding here and there in a process of response, so that each work is truly created in the round.
His toppling Flagship (2024) conjures all sorts of images from Gericault’s cataclysmic Raft of the Medusa to Tatlin’s unbuilt
Utopian Monument to the Third International. Its title references both the flagship of a naval fleet and that of an elite company or line of commercial products. The piece is anchored on one side by a seductive concrete bulge that, when viewed head-on, resembles the lumpy flesh of a nude female torso, a poorer, more mundane, down-to-earth Venus of Willendorf literally restrained between bars.
Although reminiscent of Brutalist architecture, this and other of his works on view have a primal anthropomorphic quality to them. Made of the rather “poor” industrial material concrete, they exude personality and have a refined psychological presence. We feel along with them, want to reach out and touch them.
Kasey Short / Stable Diffusion
Kasey Short’s inflated Sentinel (2024) is also immensely present with its overwhelming height, giant scaffolding of reclaimed plastic tubes, and inflated nylon skin that begs to be poked. Conjuring images of watchtowers, floating buoys, or water rescues but also children’s bouncy castles, the work was created by feeding text prompts—words like tower, architecture, air, inflatable, inflated economics, and even bits
of poetry—into the AI image-generating tool Stable Diffusion. These were translated by the digital entity into pictorial form, only to be reinterpreted by Kasey when he transformed that image into a physical object.
The finished work is a fascinating interface between human language and artificial intelligence, where media and sculpture inform each other in collaborative ways, and the borders between them are loose and diffuse. Who is the author/creator here? The one who generates text? The one who generates images? The one who physically builds?
As an interdisciplinary artist who has also had courses in architec- ture, Short has stated that working with AI can be more concrete and realistic than arriving at an abstract sculpture with his hands, it helps him create multiple versions and models without having to commit to a first built one. Indeed, Sentinel is of architectural proportions, but its volume is comprised mostly of air. Although essentially light its weight fills the space both literally and psychologically. He notes that “A tall structure forces viewers to place their [embodiment] in relation to something beyond them. Things significantly larger than us force reflections on measurement.” And it is the shape and feel of scale that is both stable and diffuse here.
Alicia Eggert / Marking Time
Inspired by physics and philosophy, Alicia Eggert views language as a malleable sculptural material that can be constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed. Her neon words and phrases—as freestanding sculptures or wall-mounted objects—lend sculptural shape to both language and time and are drawn from texts by Plato, Immanuel Kant, and Stewart Brand, among others.
The flashing All the Light You See (2017–2019) cycles through the statements “All the light you see is from the past” and “All you see is past” before switching off completely.
in addition to metal and glass, the invisible transient materials of light, time, neon (which is phosphorous or argon gas), and electricity both give form and become physically perceptible here.
The work draws attention to the fact that it takes time for light to travel, even if it’s just across the room. By the time an image of something reaches our retinas, it is already in the past. When we look at things, we look back into time, as the images of faraway galaxies delivered by the Hubble telescope attest. Thus, objects are not as they seem right now, but as they were a second, a minute, or eons ago—and the work of art is a time-delayed version of itself.
In addition to her MFA in sculpture, Eggert also has a degree in interior design, which has honed her observation of how bodies move through space choreographically and, in turn, how space can be com- posed and arranged. Her new work Hereafter (2024), combines the illuminated word “Here” with an Arte Povera-esque mound of ash. As we approach the tangible “Here,” we simultaneously land in its past image and future dissolved remains.
Which brings me to a final thought: In German, the word for sculptor/ tress is Bildhauer. Broken into its component parts (Bild = image; hau- er, from the verb hauen = to strike forcefully or carve out), it literally means to pound out an image physically. Perhaps that’s what the artists in this show are doing: pounding out transformative physical images that ask us to place a value on our bodies and their sixth sense, proprioception, in an age approaching the virtual and immaterial.
Courtenay Smith studied art history at the University of Illinois Chicago and worked as a curator for contemporary art at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. She relocated to Munich, Germany, in 1999, where she founded the project space homeroom, served on the curatorial board of the Kunstraum München, and was artistic director of the municipal contemporary art space Lothringer13. She is the co-author of Houses That Can Save the World (2022).