Despite appearing like a fairly straightforward Vallejo storefront, a few clues hint at Personal Space’s mutability. There’s even a “sign,” if you could call it that, mounted to the edge of the building. For the duration Slipper, it’s a halftone-dotted black-and-white image of something involving a hand.
Distortion is a perfect visual announcement for the current show, curated by the art space’s founder and director, Lisa Rybovich Crallé. Since Personal Space opened in July 2023, Crallé and guest curators have organized eight group shows, bringing together local, national and international artists, commissioning writing and editions, and hosting some of the best-attended openings in recent Bay Area history.
If these presentations have shared a hallmark, it’s an embrace of texture and material experimentation. Any given exhibition might contain paintings, yes, but there’s also a possibility of objects cast in oozy resin hanging on the gallery walls. The most recognizable objects in Slipper are a pair of framed drawings, but what they depict … well, that’s up for interpretation.
In a show about slipperiness, a certain amount of horizontality is expected. Suitably, Erik Frydenborg’s Nonnnecenonnn, the first piece to greet visitors’ eyes, is a stretched-out sculpture of basswood, acrylic and sand. Curves and painted hatch marks hint at Frydenborg’s source material, an archive of infographics and diagrams from a bygone era. What at first glance looks like digital skew is, up close, delightfully tangible, with a rough texture running down the sculpture’s black-painted sides.
The horizon line continues with Elina Vainio’s And stones only breathe once, a flat oblong of sand on the gallery’s floor that contains delicate lines of weighted cord camouflaged within it. From the corner through Frydenborg’s piece, a clear line of sight to Kari Cholnoky’s wall-mounted paper-pulp sculptures: spiky objects made ominous by fluorescent red paint and the attachment of tiny, menacing images.
When we encounter indecipherable things, or, as Slipper artist Albert Herter puts it, objects “that cannot be fully accounted for,” multiple pathways emerge. We can cocoon ourselves against intrusion, which Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s Sound Blanket No. 10 (psychically) welcomes us to do. The massive “fur” coat, made of hand-felted wool and human and synthetic hair, is a looming note of verticality in this very horizontal front room.
