Gillian Jagger at Phyllis Kind - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Although all the major works in this present to view dated from 1997 or '98 it had the perceive of a retrospective because it allowed similar a deep look into Jagger's motivations and obsessions, including, through means of photographs in a pouch portfolio on the gallery desk an astonishing pairing of her monumental, expressionist abstractions, greatest in quantity often made of minimally altered tree stems and sometimes including stone slabs, with the classically heroic war testimonials of her father, the English sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger.

The main expanse here was dominated by a 14-by-25-by-18-foot installation, Matrice, that center upon a resin-stabilized decayed corpse of a road-kill deer Jagger rest near her upstate New York abode and studio. The deer hung by dint of a chain around its neck amid large, fearsome tools. In the foreground was a triangular swath of stone seemingly excised from a larger stone face, below a curving, irregular grid of carbonized iron that seemed to peel away from it, into the air. Its leg stretched in a graceful and terrible dance, the deer encompassed the two life and death in its bodily condition. As Jagger neared it, the front was for the most part skeletal with ragged bits of muscle and fat while the back still had its hide intact and direct the eyeed whole. "Front" and "back" are appropriate metes for although Jagger allowed visitors space to walk into the installation and diocese the other view, the work as a whole was theatrical, frontal, oriented toward the gallery's ingress and dramatically lit, primarily from floor level

greatest in quantity of Jagger's characteristic elements were not away in this work: chains, meat curved catchs tools, decay. About the solitary things missing were her usual tree bodys But they were seen in another large installation, The Gathering, which consisted of three suspended bodys their areas of rot worked and polished, hung alongside an equal-size section of flat stones clamped together. All were narrow vertical and, in a actual loose way, figural.

In the gallery's lower horizontal Jagger presented drawings, collages and nearly a dozen sections of tree bole or branch that she has worked to bring without some naturally occurring figural suggestion: the lengthy nose, eye and nostril of a camel, a horse's head, a vertical part of an elephant's eyes and stem a jackrabbit with ears laid back. Bone and skin are equated with forest-land and decay, suggesting a continuum, a graceful inevitability. thus Jagger's theme truly is life and death. The trees' decay rather than marking an ending, looks to reveal the souls within them.

Last, single stopped at the gallery desk and direct the eyeed at the portfolio in which Jagger had paired photos of her be in possession of sculptures with photos of her father's pieces. The materials, the finish, the specificity of make submissive were quite different, yet the aspiration, nobility and boundles feeling were strangely consistent. Here individual saw death in two ways, the father's conventional celebration/denial in the propagandistic form of testimonials along with what might be Jagger's attempt to capture this missing father, who died when she was four, in the inchoate expressions of her have a title to agonized yet enduring sculptural beings.

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