The Project Space of the Wright Contemporary features Jennie Kiessling’s compassionate offerings of diaristic abstract paintings, each referencing a night of war in Gaza.
Jennie Kiessling: when the night is not blue
February 3–March 17, 2024
The Wright Contemporary, Taos
Death by forced departure brings with it an inconsolable grief that we bear witness to, sometimes from afar, and other times with immediacy and directness. Death comes with questions. Who departed? Where/when was the departure? What/who caused the departure? How we hold compassion in times of despair is fundamental to Jennie Kiessling’s artistic practice and is no less so in when the night is not blue.
Kiessling’s abstract collage paintings of misshapen cut and hand-torn paper bags, reused product packaging bathed in muted grays, reds, and off-black hues with faint angular lines of graphite and loose threads directs the viewer to come closer. This very subtle action asks the viewer to consider what is at play in Kiessling’s abstracts. The massive swaths of gray paint not only represent the rubble filled cities of Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on Earth, the gray hue directs the mind to the cloudy dust from demolished concrete whose thuds mute human cries. It’s estimated that the Israel Defense Forces are dropping around 500 bombs a day, some with a kill radius of 1,000 feet. Kiessling’s paintings are a prayer noting each day’s circumstances in Gaza while also asserting prayerfulness for something better, something that remains uncertain.
Having used these sparse and humble materials since 2021, Kiessling is drawing upon a personal lineage of destruction and imposed departure that dates to her maternal grandfather’s exodus from Basilicata, Italy. The paper bags and product packaging that once held items of daily necessity—much of it consumed by the artist as nourishment—are transformed into pieces of paper that are fragile tear-aways reassembled into paintings asked to carry the weight of war. Each piece precariously held together with various forms of household tape are created as visual ruminations sourced from the artist’s familial wounds and daily observations of media coverage of the war in Gaza. The pieced-together fragments are acts of intelligent juxtaposition designed to inform the viewer of what it is to no longer have the use, comfort, and answered needs from a pool of human necessities: food, shelter, clothing, family, land, and location.
Positioned within the art canon of abstract painter Agnes Martin and conceptual artist On Kawara, Kiessling filters her artistic marks of abstracted data through heart and mind while witnessing the passing of time. Martin waited for inspiration before marking time, Kawara inscribed meticulously painted dates accompanied with news articles, while Kiessling’s minimalist diaristic paintings, replete with wan, cut and hand-torn pieces interconnected with graphite lines that denote the willfully demolished built environment, are archived by the painting’s titles.
Each work’s title mimics the media coverage’s trope of presenting the war chronologically. We have grown accustomed to headlines that read: “November 28, 2023, the 53rd day of the Israel-Gaza conflict” followed by a listing of key events. This manner of reporting a war serves to make it palatable to the reader, yet war should never be easy to digest. When we look at night 53 we should choke, knowing that 68% of Israel’s military weaponry imports come from the United States. Over 230 cargo planes and twenty ships have delivered 5,000 MK-84 munitions and other military equipment. This, is in comparison to only three U.S. airdrops of bundles of ready-to-eat meals delivered in recent days. Thus far the war has raged for 158 days, with Kiessling chronicling the war each day with a painting.
As with the art of Martin and Kawara, Kiessling’s art does not emanate from a point of polemic statement but instead is the outcome of rigorous observation and analysis using quotidian materials. There is a near universal knowledge of the materials used in Kiessling’s art. Recycled paper, tape, gouache, and drawn lines are to be found the world over; it is their arrangement in when the night is not blue that gives them meaning. Angular cut pieces tapped together in un-matched formations that create open spaces—missing persons, missing places, unaccounted losses. These gaps—missing shapes—that will never be reconnected are symbolic of the interiority of human suffering of which our lives are as fragile as torn papers held together by strips of tape.