Mel Kendrick at Parrish Art Museum

For a lot more than 5 decades, sculptor Mel Kendrick has designed visual puzzles by getting issues apart and placing them back together once more. The ensuing operates invert spatial oppositions, providing dimension to thoughts of internal conflict.

The artist’s retrospective, “Seeing Factors in Factors,” is an invitation to love the traces of this conflict, which can be discovered in each gap, slip, and split of the artwork on screen. Whilst essentially abstract, early parts this sort of as Nemo, 1983, and Sculpture No. 2, 1991, flirt with figuration, reworking good blocks of wooden into types that want to move and increase. The sculptures of the earlier 20 decades, even so, are significantly extra distilled, reflecting an artist extra eager to think about the content constraints of his medium. In Untitled (Green Block), 2007, Kendrick begins by drawing a internet of calligraphic lines throughout each facet of a hewn block of wooden the lines serve as a blueprint for slicing into the entire. The inner sections are then eradicated and positioned on prime of the remaining structure. The result is a mirrorlike sculpture wherever a destructive graphic assignments its good counterpart, crossing a line of division embedded in each and every sort. More lately, in Double Lock, 2015, and Standing Block (Black Concrete), 2020, Kendrick has applied the exact same course of action to expanded polystyrene, which he applied to solid the benefits in black concrete. These sculptures are far more self-contained, absorbing the heat of their surroundings and transmitting a solemn quiet.

Like Narcissus gazing down at his reflection, the sculptures’ empty and good sorts produce equally harmonious and uneasy photographs. Infinite variations emerge, some coherent and some significantly less so, nevertheless every single one particular makes the case that opposition is not some thing to be defeat, but a little something to be sustained and liked.

— David Whelan