Downstairs, February 7th — March 6th

Kenny Schachter conTEMPorary is pleased to announce a showing of recent works by Steven Thompson. Thompson holds two MFAs, one in Sculpture and Mixed Media from the University of Pennsylvania, and the other in Painting and Drawing from the University of Georgia. Currently part of the faculty at the University of Georgia, he still spends long hours in the studio, and has put together an impressive body of work for this show, his second solo exhibition.

On view are several sculptural works, and a number of hung works. One sculpture resembles the tip of an iceberg coming up from the floor, an elegantly carved icon of Antarctica, “the greatest of continents,” according to Thompson. Another sculpture is constructed out of erasers packaged in hand-made wrappers, stacked together in what resembles a tower from the outside or a well from the inside. Small black and white paper ghosts squeeze through the curious edifice.

For his hung works, Thompson employs the process animators use to create the illusion of three-dimensional space. He layers tracing paper and vinyl cells to create works that rise up to four inches from the wall. While the background is typically a landscape, the various overlays of translucent paper and plastic have shapes and letters painted with ink, drawn in pencil and marker, and incised with a knife. The resulting images are clouded views into a fantastic dreamscape haunted by ghosts. The ghosts, along with moats, lakes, hills and mountains are all are part of this alternate world where a giant manufacturing plant, featured in some of the drawings, is the nucleus, the “monadic cell” that is the source of everything.

In a piece from Thompson’s “Lines in Space” series, Bass wood armatures hang on the wall around plastic bags containing the slats from which the armatures were cut. Surrounding the voids on the slats are drawings and codes. The codes denote relational positions in space, and Thompson conceived this complex system specifically to make the thin, wooden, skeletal projections that seem to move and bend according to their own mysterious, organic logic.

As Thomson says, “I would rather leave some confused than be inaccurate and understood by everyone.” Indeed, the system for fabricating the wooden armatures may be difficult to grasp, and wandering a hazy landscape of ghosts and moats has its hazards, but if Thompson is able to at least affect the “vulnerable and defenseless side of our psychic, emotional, and physical” selves, then he has fulfilled his ideal of what artists should strive for.