To say that the pieces in “One Dreams Up Another,” Kelli Cain and Anthony Chase’s two-person show at Bushel Collective in Delhi through September 13, are organic in nature is perhaps too obvious a statement. Cain’s stoneware sculpture-objects and Chase’s paintings in Italian lime plaster pulse with textures reminiscent of snake scales, trilobite fossils, petrified wood; their forms suggest coral reefs or the stray vertebrae of species long extinct. Upon spending some time with this beautifully curated show, however, I found it thrilling to observe what’s under the surface of the work’s immediate “organic” associations. The organic correspondences of the work, rather than trite or illustrative, are utterly unselfconscious. Both artists have a very particular relationship to the notion of time that comes through in their art’s vividness.
Bushel Collective, a volunteer-run space featuring exhibitions and other cultural offerings, makes for an ideal locus for these two Delhi-based artists’ work. Walking into the room, Cain’s ceramic forms immediately call out to the viewer. Each of her pieces embodies a singularity that you want to capture in some way, as a child fingers and pockets the most desirable shells or stones from the beach. Take her piece jennies two, built from wheel-thrown and assembled white stoneware with a speckled gray-white glaze. Jennies two is simultaneously knobby and spiky, rough and delicate in its elongated elegance. For white animal one and two, Cain places a pair of unglazed stoneware vessels beside each other, their forms seeming to ripple up around the contours of an invisible life force. It’s subversive the way these works resist received ideas of functionality. They’re not vessels for containing anything; rather, their forms convey a feeling of the inevitable, a sense that they couldn’t be anything other than themselves. The pieces appear alive, complete with their own characters and sensibilities. They’re emissaries from another time, come to cohabitate with us for the moment.
Anthony Chase’s works abound with their own individual presence—that quality philosopher Stanley Cavell called “total thereness” in reference to painting—and occupy a status that is somewhere between painting and sculpture. Made of painstakingly tooled layers of Italian lime plaster, Chase’s work makes me think of the way time passes on human surfaces. The large piece Saraban claims a space carefully delineated into quadrants, with figures reminiscent of cobblestones from ancient streets emerging from its surface. Looking more closely, small graffiti-like images appear scratched into the plaster: a sailboat, a planet with a single ring circling it. There’s an almost anonymous quality to these tiny images, souvenirs of a moment that has long passed. One of Chase’s dark pieces, Purge, features a burnished black plaster surface with a surprising figure made of gray graphite paste emerging from its center, glinting and alive in the light. For Murmuration, Chase pressed a piece of webbing into heavily layered lime plaster, repeating the process to create a tessellated pattern akin to birds moving in coordinated formation. These works have a way of placing the viewer between the earth and the sky, looking up into space while uncannily aware of what’s beneath your feet.
The pieces in “One Dreams Up Another” are very much kin to each other–not so much “in conversation” as actual shadow versions of one another, (extra)terrestrial siblings. This relationship is one of the most remarkable aspects of the show. Both artists have a background in filmmaking, which makes their attention to time make a sort of incredible sense. There’s a vitrine in the gallery displaying materials from both artists’ studios. Among the glaze samples and other ephemera is an open copy of director Andrei Tarkovsky’s book Sculpting in Time. One passage reads, “Rhythm colors a work with stylistic marks. It is not thought up, not composed on an arbitrary, theoretical basis, but comes into being spontaneously.” Tarkovsky goes on to say that “I see it as my professional task then, to create my own, distinctive flow of time.” It’s fitting that these artists placed this text within their exhibition, a space in which each has created their own distinct yet brilliantly harmonious sense of time.
“One Dreams Up Another,” works by Kelli Cain and Anthony Chase, is on exhibit through September 13 at Bushel Collective in Delhi.
