Jessica Rath, on the work of Christie Frields -

“Maybe I prefer the smell of gasoline to flowers,” says a coy Christie Frields, who refuses to privilege either the natural or the industrialized environment over the other, but insists on making the line ambiguous.

Consisting of three groves of twenty-foot-plus jointed PVC pipe, Stand voraciously reaches from the floor to the nearest sustenance--sun streaming from the galleries’ skylights. The sculpture appears as a series of offshoots from the rampant, tangled network of ancient and modern pipes that provide the seamless transportation of our everyday intake and waste.

Stand’s black matte sheen and massive height is menacing, robotic and ominous, yet the sculpture is oddly elegant, lilting over observer with jointed stalks, mimicking bamboo’s rampant growth and scale. Liquid-like pools created by the reflections in dark Plexiglas at each base catch a foreshortened image of the towering figures, like that of squirming rhizomes multiplying under your feet, further alluding to a complex inorganic system lurking just below the surface.

Stand asks us to be in awe, as with nature’s majesty, of the fragile system, which carries water, gas, information and electricity and gurgles to life millions of times each minute when we press “on.” Sublime for its rupture in the categorizing between nature and the manmade, I see the sculpture as an illuminating and beautiful break in this dark and hidden territory.

Christie Frields, on the work of Jessica Rath -

It is hard to know where to locate Jessica Rath’s photographs of peculiar ikebana arrangements amid the tradition of sculpture and still life, and that is precisely what makes them so compelling. In them, found and natural objects are combined to resemble careful and strange landscape motifs, while others emanate a charged corporality. Familiar elements are at once an anchor and a detour.

For example, in Stump two typical reed baskets hint at colloquial matters and the cornucopia of still life.  However, next to a bulbous tree stump, they become foreign since the scale swings between rustic landscape and certain male anatomy, leading one down all sorts of metaphorical roads. Appearing highly symbolic and irreverent, the deceptively simple arrangements float in solid fields of light and color, further complicating the desire to locate or extract specific meaning. The effect feels wrong, and it’s all right.

The record of a confident sculptor, these photographs mess around with our sense of dimension.  Favoring the frontal approach of ikebana, where the arranger is the sun, all the elements seem to yearn for consideration.  If, as the viewer, I am the sun, then I illuminate a fantastic world where I find what is essential to experiencing art, the delight of surprise and the pleasure in looking.