Archive Project 28: Jared Pankin

Catalogue Essay | Images from the Exhibition Jared Pankin Home Page | Fall 2005 Archive

The Project Series
Project 28: Jared Pankin

Jared Pankin’s installation, Long in the Tooth (Snaggleteeth), reflects his provocative take on art, architecture, landscape, and nature. Over the last ten years, Pankin has mined a terrain of political and ecological urgency. His early work suggested apocalyptic clashes between natural and cultural forces in installations of meticulously crafted animals or plants engulfed in natural or man-made disasters. Subsequent work evolved into intimate natural history dioramas, followed by, most recently, sculptures that merged a lone hand-crafted tree to massive accumulations of chunks of wood. Shifting from representational imagery in the earlier work to more abstract in the recent, Pankin’s work stems from the tradition of assemblage, in which found or fabricated forms are combined to underscore a social commentary—in Pankin’s case, the fragility of the earth and the tenuous position of nature in today’s world.

Long in the Tooth (Snaggleteeth) distills these ideas into a dramatic new visual language that links his past adherence to sculptural and ecological issues to more recent investigations into the forms of construction. The new work references concepts in the building trades, such as utilizing modularization—the repetition of architectural forms to produce cost-efficient and streamlined structures—and sustainable materials—found or reclaimed wood and lumber. Reflecting a more humble approach to sculptural materials than the traditional modernist view of sculpture as a solid, unified object, Pankin employs a vigorously handmade aesthetic that begins with accumulations of reclaimed wood; continues in the intuitive process of cutting, splitting, gluing, and nailing the strips and chunks together; and culminates in the careful balance of form, mass, and scale.

For Pankin, the fundamental components of his work remain the relationship between landscape and nature, and between elemental materials, forms, and processes. Pankin’s work reflects an organic representation of landscape. Here, the wooden armature and layered accretions of wood hint at a landscape barren of plant life and could easily reference our rugged mountain ranges; or the pinnacles, spires, and arches of Utah’s canyon lands; or the jutting curves of coral reefs. Pankin refers to Long in the Tooth (Snaggleteeth) as an archipelago, a chain of islands—in this case jutting up from the ocean/gallery floor where the peaks and valleys create direction and volume in the primal sculptural form.

Jared Pankin’s exhibition is the twenty-eighth in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of focused exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator