28 Sep 2017

Theresa Hackett and ​Shari Mendelson: Excavations & Certainties

John Molloy Gallery

Reviewed by Michelle Weinberg

John Molloy is a former apartment converted to a cozy gallery, a pleasant counter to bland big-box art venues. Experiencing contemporary art within the "ruins" of a domestic space is consonant with the works of Theresa Hackett and Shari Mendelson.

Hackett's paintings depict landscapes with obvious cues, open windows, borders, and horizon lines. The surfaces offer up the strata of those landscapes. Composed of diatomaceous earth and clay-like substances, petite, hand-built, bowl-like features sprout from their surfaces.

Mendelson's sculptures quote ancient Greco-Roman and Islamic artifacts, but are painstakingly fashioned from contemporary recycled plastic consumer objects, ersatz facsimiles of cultural treasures.

These works allude to the passage of time, of sifting through the accumulated sediment of nature and culture. They conjure the magic inherent in the tactility of materials to convey stories.