This Friday at 6 p.m., Memphis-based sculptor and installation artist Jessica Lund will be giving a talk about her most recent show, “WREFORD,” in the gallery at Crosstown Arts.
Attendees of the talk might hear stories about Lund’s former landlord (Wreford himself), or the resident apartment complex cat (Elvis), or about what it is like to live in an apartment that, according to Lund, “looked like a scene from Hoarders.”
Lund, who recently received her MFA from the University of Memphis, says that her interest is in how people relate to the spaces they inhabit; how architecture shapes people and their habits. Lund’s concern is with mundanities of property: a neighbor who threaded his failing fence together with an old garden hose, or a weekly $2 fine levied on apartment residents who failed to correctly dispose of their trash.
“WREFORD” is a paean to life in a low-budget apartment complex. (Plexiglass sliding doors, whitewashed metal fences, hair-grain carpeting over cement floor. Rooms that have been vetted by flea bombs and laden with roach motels. For those with an architectural bent: last-ditch Corbusian modernism, rentable for $600ish bucks a month.)
The back wall of the show is composed of insulation, layered concentrically, a zen mounting of that sublime pink stuff usually only seen in half-lit attics. The wall works as a humorous backsplash for other elements of Lund’s show, including an axial sculpture of plywood and intricately cut carpet samples, located center-gallery and looking something like an imploded building.
Lund’s show also conveys a sense of constantly being monitored through motion-censored lights, placed above a series of wall-mounted shoe box sculptures. It is a clever play on the practice of lighting individual paintings in a gallery from above. Rather than unobtrusive track lighting, Lund includes intrusive high wattage outdoor lighting; rather than paintings, small boxes coated in camo duct tape and mesh, arranged into pseudo floor plans.
Lund’s show is cleanly executed without losing a sense of the intuitive. It is successful at communicating the indefinable atmosphere of a place without sacrificing humor.
The talk, and following keg party, will be held at Crosstown Gallery from 6-9 p.m., Friday August 30th.
Images: Katie McWeeney
