Remergency
Will Kaplan
March 11 - April 1, 2023
Opening reception Saturday, March 11h 6-9pm.
“Remergency,” a solo installation of Will Kaplan’s recent work. The found object assemblages on view expand Kaplan’s ability to depict our shared reality while building new imaginative worlds.
The artist has adapted William Carlos Williams’ famous saying as his creative maxim: “no ideas but between things.” Accordingly the entire installation operates in the tension between poles: facades and interiors, history and myth, science and fantasy, the urban and natural.
The show finds its heart in the new series “DIRE/AMA” created specifically for Bob’s gallery. Using found drawers in his furthest venture into three dimensions, Kaplan sculpts an honest image of the physical and mental spaces where he and fellow humans spend time. Across seven settings – body, nature, city, hell, cosmos, transit, and home–Kaplan conjures an idiosyncratic pop mythology using poems, tiny objects, collages and prints. He populates the miniature worlds with drawings of friends and family sourced from sketch pads, which adds an intimacy and personal stake to the archetypal environments.
“Remergency” also showcases new works on found panels. Text on distressed wood reminds Kaplan of mass-marketed home plaques which implore us to “Live, Laugh, Love.” He employs this aesthetic of Whiteness to confront its darker means of control and power. “Night Light” uses clipboards and a cabinet to scrutinize an urban police-state. In “Bites” a door’s ornamental framing helps untangle the sexism embedded in faith and science alike.
Throughout, bursts of intense color contrast with muted natural textures and clear negative space. Kaplan places this impulse within a contemporary movement to balance ecstatic oversaturation with quieter meditative restraint. He coins this trend “Mini-Max,” or minimalist maximalism to describe our absorption of and numbness to the era’s excess and overstimulation. While depicting the causes of collective anxiety, Kaplan offers images of beauty and respite, rising as resistance to the brutalizing, oppressive structures of modern existence . Viewers can carry this consoling power of imagery out of the installation and into the world it mimics.