Shotgun Review
Claire Jackel
September 20, 2011These days, site specificity is where one finds it. In the case of the four works presented by Claire Jackel at Gallery 555—an outreach program of the Oakland Museum of California—one finds it in a plush corporate lobby housing some Internet companies, accounting firms, and other LLP-type organizations proclaiming themselves to be “equity partners.” Around the corner is another building that is home to the Department of Homeland Security, meaning that one always sees a small flock of DHS vehicles parked nearby, and where inside the lobby, one finds a train wreck. Hanging from the lobby’s high ceiling is a small locomotive made of carefully cut translucent paper, towing over a dozen similarly scaled passenger cars formed out of the same material. All of these are jackknifed against each other in a way that suggests that the whole procession had run off the rails, mirroring the work’s title, You’ve Gone Off the Rails (2010). Adding some spice to the scene is the fact that, from certain angles, the jackknifed cars look like volatile stock market graphs, making the work read as an allegorical representation of recent catastrophes in the global financial markets.
This reading is supported by other works, such as a box-like cluster of eighty upside down paper houses titled Make Me New (2010), which seems to say something about mass foreclosures and the tragic human stories resulting from same. Another work, titled Sink and Subside (2009), gives us a sextet of paper backhoe shovels reaching out from under a pile of dirt, obviously trying to dig themselves out from under a small mountain of unsustainability. Given the magnitude of the recent financial crisis, it seems odd that so few artists have made work that reflect upon its ongoing ramifications, but Jackel has done so, with an impressive degree of wit and lyric poignancy.
Make Me New, 2010; paper, monofilament; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery 555, Oakland.