Kyle Clairmont Jacques

Walking up the three flights of steps leading to Astor Weeks always winds my asthmatic  lungs. The first room of the gallery is small, so I expect to be able to catch my breath  with a work or two that set the pace for the main exhibition in the second and main  gallery. But Kyle Clairmont Jacques’ solo show Long Leash in many ways defies my  expectations: There is no rest for my body, because while this first room does set the  stage for what is to come, it does so through radical juxtaposition. 

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Upon entering, I'm thrust into darkness; two walls are covered by a full-bleed two channel video projection piece, also entitled Long Leash. It’s a collaborative installation  done with the musician, filmmaker, and conceptual artist Alex LaLiberte. In each  projection we are met with a different view of what appears to be the same location. The  largest of the projections, directly across from the entryway, is a panning shot of a New York City rooftop nestled among much higher sky-rises. It’s a spatially engaging  sequence, in which the vantage point is about 25 feet from the center of the rooftop -- my position as viewer might be on the edge of the rooftop, might be in a nearby  building, might be in the void in between. On the smaller wall to the left is a tighter shot  showing Jacques' upper body, his hands and mouth controlling the tension of what  appears to be a kite string. Although its location seems to be the same as the larger  projection, I was never granted the “aha” moment of identification between the  projections, presenting my body in a kind of dislocation, forcing it to step into yet  another kind of void. In a moment of somatic mirroring I imagine I'm the kite. 

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Walking through a black curtain into the main gallery, I was shocked by the contrast of  light. In fact, while I’ve been to the gallery many times, I’ve actually never seen the  gallery so warmly bedecked in patches of light. (For reference I visited at 2:00 p.m. I’d  recommend going to the space at that time on a clear day.) The room is populated by  three wall sculptures and one very long sculpture living between the ceiling and wall. In  many ways the works are site-specific, as their construction uses holes directly drilled  into the wall to hold steel tubes in place with tensioned waxed thread to further secure  them. The three wall works are variations on a single form: Metal lattices hold bilaterally  drapery -- wide rings of waxed cloth. The variations are the color (burgundy, brown,  and a very deep purple) and the scale. Instantly recognizable as post-minimal in nature,  they also display a kind of romanticism, and with titles such as Deadpan Flamboyance, Love Theme, and Peace is our Profession, they offer up an odd kind of  personification that’s difficult to resolve into a narrative. Instead, it is precisely  their immediacy as objects that grants them this allusion to romanticism; even without seeing the artist’s hands at work we see the artist's drive against such forces as gravity  and entropy.