LINCOLN, MA.- DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum announces PLATFORM 9: Jedediah Caesar on view May 26–August 12, 2012. PLATFORM 9: Jedediah Caesar presents new work centered on the artist’s interest in the temporal nature of landscape—specifically as it pertains to deCordova’s Sculpture Park. As part of the ongoing PLATFORM series, in which artists are invited to envision work which responds to deCordova’s unique indoor and outdoor space, Caesar created an outdoor installation along with new sculpture, video, and printed matter, presented with his sculptural cuts, that collectively reflect on place as a temporal, social, and sculptural material.
A graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Jedediah Caesar is now based in Los Angeles and creates sculptures from amassed and congealed materials that speak to process, temporality, and location in contemporary art. Filling containers with found objects from specific sites—a road trip through California, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, or his own studio—Caesar collects and recombines a variable grouping of natural and man-made refuse which he sets in resin and then slices. The result is a condensation and reorganization of time and place into forms that flirt between the abstract and real, painting and sculpture, and old and new. Caesar’s practice of collecting, condensing, and re-presenting found materials functions as a type of postindustrial fusion of geological and archeological processes. The slices of resin-bound objects resemble geologic cross-sections and the intricate patterning of speckled marble and follow a similar logic of formation: compression, secretion, and metamorphism. These natural, time-based operations of stone and rock find their sculptural translation in Caesar’s work as he engineers their aggregate formation. Similarly, Caesar’s process of gathering found material—mostly unwanted items—is a form of reverse archeology. If an archeologist is tasked with carefully mining the earth for hidden, man-made treasures to understand a stratified history in which “deeper” is equated with “older,” Caesar presents an alogical and unordered record of time and place as he reshuffles the detritus from his travels into solid form. In doing so, Caesar reflects on the different mode of time between natural and human histories as well as the capacity of a site, of a landscape, to echo that very discrepancy.
PLATFORM 9: Jedediah Caesar features a Park project, Californianian, and a related plaster cast from the landscape, alongside printed matter that explores travel and collection as a form of sculptural methodology. The exhibition also debuts Caesar’s new video animation composed of a progression of sculptural slices recently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which adds a new temporal layer to Caesar’s work—that of constructed, edited cinematic time.
PLATFORM is a series of solo exhibitions by early- and mid-career artists from both the New England and national arts communities. These shows focus on work that engages with deCordova's unique architectural spaces and social, geographical, and physical location. The PLATFORM series is intended as a support for creativity and expression of new ideas, and as a catalyst for dialogue about contemporary art.
Jedediah Caesar was born in 1973 in Oakland, CA. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Casesar received his MFA, from University of California, Los Angeles and his BFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His recent solo exhibitions include the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA; D’Amelio Terras, New York, NY; and Bloomberg Space, London, England. Caesar has been included in group exhibitions at Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), Los Angeles, CA; Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA; Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. His work is included in the collections of The New Museum, New York, NY; Saatchi Gallery, London, England; The Blanton Museum, University of Texas at Austin, TX; and The Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA.
