JERRY BIRCHFIELD | A Pale, A Post, A Boundary | February 6 – March 27, 2021
Time seems to rain down on the fragmentary objects that Birchfield arranges and photographs, dissolving even the idea of form itself, while the ever-evolving chemical and digital processes of photography generate intricate, shadowy layers of visual clues and blind alleys.
– Douglas Max Utter
Jerry Birchfield’s practice revolves around the question of how images emulate or subvert the sources from which they came. Through complex photographic and sculptural processes, his works go through various stages of transformation, from surrogate to self-reference. The making of meaning is synonymous with the search for the beginning and the end.
– Reto Thüring
Birchfield engages us in an aesthetic and a sensorial dialectic of the way things come into existence as we perceive them and sort them out; as perhaps a metaphor for the way we negotiate our lives without being nearly cognizant of all the minute changes that have occurred in any given space at any given moment. There emerges a personal exploration of expressive and theoretical ambition that, in its open delight of ready shifts from one mode to another, points to some larger meaning that remains tantalizingly elusive.
– Gary D. Sampson
The elements that conform to what eventually appears as a quiet black and white syntactical whole are, in fact, samples of a murmuring universe peopled with weird objects. And it is these intermediary weird objects that call my attention in Birchfield’s work: they float, curl, levitate and have an ambivalent relation to pattern and camouflage.
– Sarah Demeuse
Birchfield creates kinships or correspondences of semblance, perceptual conditions, and analogous structures whose material properties evade immediate identification….selections as encountered in the temporal space of the installation begin to yield a significance beyond their localized presence, a strange allegory of larger forces at work in the networked world that causes uncertainty in the trustworthiness of images and their sources.
– Gary D. Sampson
