VISUAL ARTS

Los Angeles-based artist Jedediah Caesar creates sculptures from amassed and congealed materials that speak to process, temporality, and location in contemporary art. Filling containers with found objects from a specific site—a road trip through California, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, or his own studio—Caesar collects and recombines a variable grouping of natural and man-made refuse which he sets in resin and then slices. The result is a compression and reorganization of time and place into forms that flirt between the abstract and real, painting and sculpture, and old and new.

Caesar’s sculptural practice of collecting, condensing, and re-presenting found and often discarded materials becomes a post-industrial interpretation of geological processes. The thin slices of these object-laden bricks, akin to a geologic cross-section, resemble the intricate patterning of speckled marble and follow a similar logic of formation: compression, secretion, and metamorphism. Accordingly, his work is often inspired by the crystalline forms of geodes, the transformation of limestone into marble, and the visual layers of time exposed in each and every slice of rock. These natural, time-based processes find their sculptural translation in Caesar’s work in form and concept, as he reverse engineers their aggregate formation.

PLATFORM 9: Jedediah Caesar presents new work that explores the artist’s broader practices as they pertain to land and site—specifically to that of deCordova’s landscape. For this exhibition, Caesar will present new outdoor installation, sculpture, video, and printed matter along with his sculptural cuts that collectively reflect on place as a temporal, social, and sculptural material.