A Mirror to Forget
Jessica Butler
Isabella Kressin
November 9 - December 12, 2021
@
Gern en Regalia
Review by Vanessa Holyoak
On a cold, early December evening in New York, I amble into Gern en Regalia’s storefront space in Lower Manhattan’s Alphabet City, peering like Alice through her looking glass into the equivocal enchanted realm crafted by artists Jessica Butler and Isabella Kressin, whose works come together in A Mirror To Forget, on view from November 6 to December 19, 2021. A beguiling, mystical fever dream where both artists’ delicate attention to materiality meets a hazy repertoire of femme-centric Internet-sourced iconography, the exhibition reads like an ode to the dark magic of ‘90s North-American girlhood. Together, the 20 small works cast a collective spell, ranging from Butler’s Girl Who Looks Under Rocks, an unwieldy wooden wall sculpture depicting the kind of spooky tree that might catch you off-guard in an enchanted Disney forest — complete with creeping dried moss, holes for eyes, and gnarled roots as hands and feet — to Kressin’s laser printed wooly silken wearables — Blouse, Apron, and Matted Bib. But I’m not always sure if it’s a spell or a curse — whether this ensemble of talismans brings ill omens, everlasting youth, or simply an eery spiraling effect that recalls the familiar black hole of the Internet, in which we lose ourselves in a flurry, devouring image after image, barely taking the time to catch our breath.
Both artists have produced works that skirt the line between photography and sculpture, in which source images seem to creep out of their two-dimensionality, threatening to crawl into our world. Butler’s works often embody their own framing mechanisms, while Kressin’s pieces seem to overflow from their frames, taking on a life of their own beyond their containers. Kressin’s materials of choice are primarily silk and wool, employing a technique of laser printing black and white images onto loose sheets of silk enshrouded in shapely woolen protrusions. A purple, butterfly-like insect eclipses a nonchalantly smoking figure in one piece entitled Girl Smoking, and an enhanced white frame reminiscent of snowy moss cloisters a lanky, lounging body in Cocoon Eternal (Halifax), the frame in turn partially occluded by the sinewing form of a spider with bared teeth — less a menace that a conjuring of the subject’s making. These subjects are primarily women caught in various sultry states of nudity, relaxation, and pleasure — reclining with closed eyes or a soft gaze that neither invites nor wards off, granting us a glance into their quiet jouissance.
Butler’s ink-jet prints coincide with a rich amalgam of materials that layer one another in a manner that recalls the microcosms of the laptop screen, in which pop-up windows, advertisements, videos, and snapshots all share space on an impenetrable rectangular surface. In Sis+Bel Spells, an image of a lighting strike illuminates a blue-black background interspersed with tiny windows of obscure found imagery, a miniature plastic purple door providing an imaginary portal into this ominous stormy night. The entire sculpture is encapsulated in a frame made from grapevines that hold everything together — spellbinding in both the physical and meta-physical senses. Subterranean Desire also adheres to this layering effect, blurring the boundaries between image and object — in this case the object being a found wooden dollhouse ladder that we might just be able to climb up to visit the spectral figure depicted beyond, who seems to be entering her own kind of trompe l’oeil rabbit hole. Whether we take this journey is of course up to us, but the time is right and there is magic surely afoot. And once we enter, whether we’ll remember our adventures is another thing altogether. Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?
