JESSE WINE

Limbs, leaves, houses, and buildings appear as icons of a suspended memory. Organic matter is preserved beyond the reach of time; architecture is halted in an arrested state. What appears still is continuously reanimated by the viewer’s movement. Not all of these bodily forms resolve into clearly legible parts; some function instead as ambiguous masses or zones—suggesting a shoulder’s breadth, the turn of an elbow, or the density of a clavicular area—volumes that register corporeality without fully submitting to anatomical clarity. The deft manipulation of material properties to camouflage the hard as malleable, or the muscular as mineral is at the heart of Wine’s practice. In Evening, All Day Long (2026), a simplified, scaled version of the artist’s father’s home sinks into a sculpted mattress, becoming a hybrid support for disembodied limbs. While the stalk-like sections of Song For My Father (2026) create a framing structure from bronze-cast plants, a delicate constellation on the threshold of growth and decay.

Across the exhibition, the clay pieces convey a sense of gravity and compression, as though pulled downward by their own weight, while the bronze has a near-weightless lift—an upward drift that introduces a directional tension between materials, states, and registers. Wine’s work gathers autobiographical coordinates and settles them into constellations that remain open-ended. In Positions (2026), an arm shoots upward, topped with drop-like, bulbous shapes, beside a Brancusian column, pairing a mutant efflorescence with a readily recognizable icon of modern sculpture. Once abstracted into motifs, these forms operate less as clues to be deciphered than as ideas or moments to be held simultaneously. Domestic space, the natural world, and the body all relate to habitation and memory, drawing on the universal and personal at once.

Rather than resolving these elements into a single reading, the works ask that they be held in a state of productive suspension, mirroring the condition of contemporary life itself, in which multiple, often contradictory ideas coexist, overlap, and remain in flux.

Courtesy Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel.