The following is video documentation of
Kelly Jacobson's
Ground. This was the opening night which coincided with Rochester's First Friday events.
My Take: Jacobson sees a need for growth and expansion. But... what is good and fresh and most attractive and fecund is out of reach, contained, inside one's self or beneath the surface where others can't see or they themselves realize can't be touched but we all know is there, dormant. The metaphors here are obvious - a hole in the wall, for example, through which we can see where green things grow that we can smell and desire and peek at but can't reach. This in the middle of an upstate NY winter (which for those who haven't experienced one can be a painful and sustained dormancy of colorless gray). Since Jacobson is an artist producing at an admirable pace and sensitive to a public, searching for opportunity in a place and time that seems to withhold opportunity due to strained economy, noticeable inflation and over saturation of market, her efforts seems honest. While there wasn't really a bad piece in the exhibit, my preference for jars and things in jars and taxonomy in general I could do without. But a bed of green and burlap sacks of good raw soil seems full of potential and welcome at such a time and Jacobson seems to know this given hints like the thick plasters and dull gray mottled walls, as in a tomb, she chooses for the containing space of the gallery. Tombs can be a place of resurrection, like dreams, full of hope, or a place of finality and disappointment. Ultimately we are left without resolution.
A resolution, I gather, may be gleaned from her statement, an excerpt of
Louise Glück's poem
The Seven Ages. For right now though, I'm right there with it (or without it).
