Affected by the rawness of the walk down an unfinished staircase featuring the original plaster walls, exposed and weathered concrete floors, Below Constructions is a presentation of works by five artists who allow surfaces to act as their medium– exploring the “here and now” of art making materials. When completion doesn’t involve a conventional finishing or framing of the art object, but rather an affirmation of the reality of the object itself, the studio’s tool box becomes evident, and a glimpse of the worktable made visible.
 

Using canvas cut intuitively into map-like shapes, Capucine Bourcart adorns her cotton or jean surfaces with coded lines and astute, playful constellations drawn using commonly discarded materials such as dryer lint or wadded-up cat hair. Also exposing grounds, Yissho Oh pours silicone on burlap and canvas to construct topographic pools of the elastic medium while the coarse surface remains exposed in careful moments, all interwoven with marks made by an electric tattoo machine. Using light itself as ground, Silvia Muleo rubs paint into the forms and depths of the image where light does not pass, creating an illusory effect with a thoughtful entanglement of reflection, distortion and place. Jingyao Huang employs light in a different mode, curling and interweaving strips of photo paper with abstracted landscapes, considering light passing through form. Using unfinished wood made either hastily or slowly into shape, Al Svoboda inserts small paintings into the wood form works to affirm painting as an object on-the-move, and delineate their space on the wall.

The works in Below Constructions are seemingly waiting; they sit, full of potential energy grown from a conscious decision by the artists to stop just before their ground is concealed, edges are hemmed, light is blocked out, or paper succumbs to gravity. Surfacing under, from the basement level of Ki Smith Gallery, raw signifiers point to surface as medium, transmuting matter and unveiling grounds.