Mel Kendrick at Parrish Art Museum

For far more than 5 decades, sculptor Mel Kendrick has produced visible puzzles by taking issues aside and placing them back with each other once again. The ensuing functions invert spatial oppositions, providing dimension to emotions of internal conflict.

The artist’s retrospective, “Seeing Issues in Items,” is an invitation to get pleasure from the traces of this conflict, which can be uncovered in every hole, slip, and break of the artwork on exhibit. Although basically abstract, early pieces such as Nemo, 1983, and Sculpture No. 2, 1991, flirt with figuration, transforming sound blocks of wood into types that want to transfer and mature. The sculptures of the previous twenty many years, on the other hand, are significantly far more distilled, reflecting an artist additional eager to take into account the substance constraints of his medium. In Untitled (Green Block), 2007, Kendrick starts off by drawing a internet of calligraphic strains throughout each individual aspect of a hewn block of wood the traces provide as a blueprint for cutting into the whole. The inside components are then taken out and positioned on top rated of the remaining framework. The final result is a mirrorlike sculpture where a negative picture jobs its solid counterpart, crossing a line of division embedded inside each and every kind. A lot more not long ago, in Double Lock, 2015, and Standing Block (Black Concrete), 2020, Kendrick has applied the very same course of action to expanded polystyrene, which he applied to cast the final results in black concrete. These sculptures are extra self-contained, absorbing the heat of their environment and transmitting a solemn serene.

Like Narcissus gazing down at his reflection, the sculptures’ empty and stable forms generate both equally harmonious and uneasy images. Infinite versions arise, some coherent and some fewer so, however each and every one would make the scenario that opposition is not anything to be conquer, but some thing to be sustained and savored.

— David Whelan