On Beyond Representation

Almost is the key word here: Giegerich‘s trajectory is, at its most essential, a balancing act. Balancing deliberation and ambiguity. Balancing a minimalist, Povera attention to materials with a voracious stylistic appetite drawing from cubism, constructivism, pop, deco, high-modernist design, art nouveau, and the kitchen sink. Balancing a hard-nosed, literate, competitive conceptualism with a subtle, sensual, attention to aesthetic minutiae. Balancing the delicate induction of audience introspection against the hardwired efficiency of industrial signage, arranging familiar visual tropes in uncomfortable configurations. Teetering on the edge of being either too intellectually dry or too decoratively moist, Giegerich’s work certainly resides next to Karen Carson‘s or Lari Pittman’s for its singularly SoCal (in spite of the artist hailing from Chappaqua, New York) version of decorative conceptualism (in spite of the deliberate but arbitrary absence of evident painterly chops).

Giegerich‘s first work from 1995 -- consisting of a pair of highly tailored pants draped with elliptical skeins of gold chainage and anchored by a brass plumb clipped between the cuffs, all hovering in front of a quartet of silkscreened B&W photographs of old-growth tree trunks on a nylon banner pinioned by lathed doweling -- typifies her flamboyant ambivalence. While raising fence straddling to a high art, Giegerich’s work remains firmly rooted in an antagonistic, bipolar, high-contrast understanding of human perception, a dazzling, wobbly world-view that underlies all great design. Continually verging on the rational, it pulls back every time with breathtaking elan. As Karl (of the Flyings) Wallenda once said, “To be on the wire is life -- the rest is waiting.”

JILL GIEGERICH: Survey 1979--2001 | At the ARMORY CENTER FOR THE ARTS | 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena | Through December 29

(626) 792-5101 | www.armoryarts.org