Jared Pankin at Carl Berg

Jared Pankin's inventive new sculptures probe the increasingly murky distinction in our culture between the natural and the artificial, the raw and the cooked. In his works, finely detailed models of palm and fir trees are installed on sprawling, angular conglomerations of axed plywood, found pressboard fragments and two-by-fours. The rough chips and splinters are nailed and glued together into spindly towers and extended fingerlike platforms that serve as bases for the handmade trees, which are themselves meticulously cobbled together from tiny fragments of dried wood; carefully flaked craqelure--the recipe for which is not disclosed--simulates aged bark.

The six pieces shown (all 2005) play off the oddities of the Western landscape, emulating the precarious precipices formed by mudslides and earthquakes and the stark, blasted-out rock faces that abut mountain freeways. The firs and pines of Pankin's sculptures inexplicably thrive on grounds that look unstable and materially corrupt. The juxtaposition of the fussily constructed trees and their funky, expressionistic bases brings home the schizoid quality of our cultivation of nature. Plywood and pressboard, both industrial amalgamates, are literally deconstructed in these works, brought back to their shardlike constituents.

Yet Pankin's enterprise is by no means a simple ecological outcry. While formally intricate, the sculptures have an off-kilter humor. The bases are ungainly, jerry-built settings that playfully complement the divalike trees. A 5-foot palm in Natural, Natural History (Lucifer's Left Nut) stands preposterously high, seemingly overcompensating for the precipitous dip of its wall-mounted ground. Two other works feature tall scruffy pines installed on tapering bases. These scraggly, balding survivors transcend their shattered, windswept landscapes to become spires and pinnacles, signals of tough endurance. The extreme settings seem to promote growth and bedraggled fertility, while the dialectic of nature and artifice acquires an unexpected swagger.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group