Slow Looking

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Rachel Topham Photography

Left to Right: Jessica Stockholder, “The Watchman,” 2022; Matt Browning, “Handles,” 2025; James Carl, “Reservoir (’95 Cavalier),” 2023

Left to Right: computer cases, fabric, thread, acrylic and oil paint, plaster, hardware, glue, 16 x 39 x 8 in.; carved Douglas fir, 28 x 2 x 2 in.; bardiglio grey and rosso cardinale marble, 20 x 23 x 9 in. (Photo: Rachel Topham Photography) (courtesy of the Gallery)

Artists: Nairy Baghramian, Matt Browning, James Carl, Devon Knowles, Clémence de La Tour du Pin, Liz Larner, Christina Mackie, Liz Magor, Ellen Neel, Jessica Stockholder

The term ‘slow looking’ has been adopted in museum culture as a pedagogical shortcut to encourage visitors to consider artwork beyond a statistically quick glance—a soft counter to the generalized, contemporary disregard for the specificities of art and art histories. This aligns with the current dominant desire and demand across culture for immediacy, asking for art to communicate instantly and that its authorship and attendant meanings circulate easily. Taking this context as a catalyst to consider works that resist and/or alter these prevailing modes, Slow Looking highlights discrete art objects that encourage a sustained unfolding of aesthetic experience. These works invite contemplation and provide us with encounters of beguiling opacity and abstraction, directing us to a more complex, mediated encounter.

Through the committed, sophisticated, and interconnected languages of material, form, production, and their related histories, the artists here simultaneously confound and expand our understanding of culture and the physical world. Nairy Baghramian and Liz Larner both develop direct and explicit connections between the seemingly fragile materials of glass, ceramic, and the hard gallery wall through custom metal mount and joint hardware. The vertical, bodily translucent forms by Baghramian prominently contrasts Larner’s opaque, textured, subtly coloured panels—their forms counteracting the physical reality of gravity—making the strange ever stranger.

Devon Knowles’ enigmatic wall sculptures merge historical and contemporary fabrication methods to produce aesthetically unpredictable forms. Here the artist has enlarged a child’s macaroni necklace and a stained glass panel through 3D scanning, printing, and finally articulated through ancient glass and aluminum casting methods—pushing her sculptures far beyond their referential origins as their new surfaces refract light. James Carl also employs classical and modern techniques in his laboriously carved vernacular forms: producing an alternate reality where scale, material, and detail sit closely alongside, but not identical to our own. A gleaming ice cube tray floats above its plinth—its white marble calcite sparkling and translucent—alongside a car engine fluid reservoir that balances elegantly upon a red marble mount usually reserved for historical busts. The subtle seam from the reservoir’s original plastic fabrication, now hewn in marble, along with its technological form speaks to the future, the present, and the past simultaneously.

Ellen Neel’s powerful raw cedarwood carvings also operate in this material–relation to time. In this series, Neel worked simultaneously against tradition in her unique process, while upholding her familial practices in both form and material. By carving the masks against the grain of wood rather than with it, as custom dictated, she adopted a much more difficult task to extraordinary effect: revealing the growth lines of the tree itself. The resulting undulating, topographic-like lines articulate time from natural occurrence, while creating a new formal conversation within a specific form.

Clémence de La Tour du Pin transforms umbrellas in varying stages of disintegration, found in a former aristocratic French home, into curiously organic and technological relics. Through attending to subtle details of their material deterioration, the artist mends the decay with 10 karat gold and ornate thread. In careful parallel, Liz Magor’s figureless duffle coat sculpture accentuates a past by highlighting and caring for its former use through small sewn additions, contrived moth holes, and cast cookies. Seemingly forming itself from random objects, Christina Mackie’s work features a small prone body laid upon a sparkling stretcher. Scraps of rope, child’s clay, gemstones, glass, and sea-life, all in varying colours of green correlated tones, coalesce briefly to render a just-present body.

In relation to this conglomeration of disparate materials, Jessica Stockholder’s colourful, elaborate compositions from our contemporary material flotsam and jetsam leverage the phenomenological and the chromatic with disposability and permanence simultaneously. We oscillate between the abstraction of total composition and the specificity of the forms with familiar origins. Matt Browning’s objects directly address their own material origins, economic life, and related production methods. Heat shrunk, plastic bottles are layered to create pillow-like, semi-translucent wall jewels, offset by Dr. Pepper soda which has been reduced into a crude oil-like viscous material. These minimalist transformations are punctuated by an interlocking wood grid hand-carved from a solid block in the tradition of “wood whimsies.”

It is through the richness of a slow encounter mediating the objects that the complexities and refinements of the works can identify and subvert our expectations. By considering what they are made of and how they are made, alongside the nuances of their visual and cultural languages and histories, the artworks themselves reveal how generous seemingly difficult objects can be. Slow Looking encourages the viewer to consider how the past informs our present, allowing us to engage, think abstractly, and perceive a world different.

–Peter Gazendam